Japanese bury disaster victims en masse

Tsunami survivors in devastated towns along Japan's northeast coast buried their dead in makeshift graves en masse Wednesday as workers at Fukushima's overheated nuclear plant struggled to cool down the crippled facility.

With supplies of fuel and ice dwindling, officials have abandoned cremation in favor of quick, simple burials in a show of pragmatism over tradition. Some are buried in bare plywood caskets and others in blue plastic tarps, with no time to build proper coffins. The bodies will be dug up and cremated once crematoriums catch up with the glut, officials have assured families.

In Higashimatsushima in Miyagi prefecture, about 320 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, soldiers lowered bare plywood coffins into the ground, saluting each casket, as families watched from a distance and helicopters occasionally clattered overhead.

Some relatives placed flowers on the graves. Most remained stoic, folding hands in prayer. Two young girls wept inconsolably, hugged tightly by their father.

"I hope their spirits will rest in peace here at this temporary place," said Katsuko Oguni, 42, a relative of one of the dead.

In Fukushima, the struggle to stabilize the plant suffered another setback Wednesday after a spike in radiation levels forced officials to pull workers and suspend restoring power to the Unit 2 reactor, a Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official said in Tokyo.

The setback showed how tenuous the situation remains nearly two weeks after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out power to the Fukushima complex, allowing radiation leaks that have seeped into vegetables, raw milk, the water supply and even seawater.

Japan's government estimates the cost of the earthquake and tsunami could reach $309 billion US, making it the world's costliest natural disaster on record. That figure is considerably higher than previous estimates. The World Bank on Monday said damage might reach $235 billion.

The nuclear crisis has complicated the government's response to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that swallowed up villages along the coast. The number of bodies collected stood at more than 9,400, with more than 14,700 people listed as missing. Those tallies may overlap.

Hundreds of thousands remain homeless. Schools, gymnasiums and other community buildings in the northeast are still packed with survivors, many of them elderly who are suffering after days without heat, medicine or hot meals.

In Fukushima, relief after the lights went on late Tuesday in the control room of Unit 3 made way hours later for concern over radiation levels in Unit 2 putting on hold plans to try restarting the plant's crucial cooling system. The sprawling nuclear complex has six units.

In the first five days after the disasters struck, the Fukushima complex saw explosions and fires in four of the plant's six reactors, and the leaking of radioactive steam into the air. Since then, progress continued intermittently as efforts to spray seawater on the reactors and rewire the complex were disrupted by rises in radiation and elevated pressure in reactors.