A March 11, 2011 ferocious tsunami spawned by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded slammed Japan's eastern coast Friday, killing hundreds of people as it swept away boats, cars and homes while widespread fires burned out of control.
Police said 200 to 300 bodies were found in the northeastern coastal city of Sendai, the city in Miyagi prefecture (state) closest to the quake's epicenter. Another 88 were confirmed killed and at least 349 were missing. The death toll was likely to continue climbing given the scale of the disaster.
The magnitude-8.9 offshore quake unleashed a 23-foot (seven-meter) tsunami and was followed by more than 50 aftershocks for hours, many of them of more than magnitude 6.0.
Dozens of cities and villages along a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) stretch of coastline were shaken by violent tremors that reached as far away as Tokyo, hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the epicenter. A large section of Kesennuma, a town of 70,000 people in Miyagi, burned furiously into the night with no apparent hope of the flames being extinguished
the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station that is likely to have a more lasting impact, even though it has yet to claim a single life. Japan is just beginning what promises to be a decades-long radiation cleanup of the evacuated areas around the plant, where nearly 90,000 residents lost their homes.The disaster led to soul searching in a nation already worn down by two lost decades of economic growth, a rapidly aging and shrinking population, political paralysis and the rapid rise of its longtime rival, China.
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