[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

One other issue that came up concerned funerary customs and cremation.

Just this morning NPR reported on the substantial backlog crematorium operators now face in dealing with the numbers of deceased. Shrines and temples face similar backlogs.

Thought I'd post this follow-up to that NPR story, to give people here a sense of the scale of damage in tsunami-hit Miyagi prefecture. It's been two weeks since the quake and tsunami, and it's only just last weekend that families in Northeast Japan are beginning to cremate their dead.

Furnaces fire up at tsunami-hit crematorium

Natori, Miyagi prefecture (March 28, Mon): The furnaces are burning again at the tsunami-battered crematorium in Natori, where workers face a grisly backlog of bodies from Japan's worst natural disaster in nearly a century.

Since the March 11 tsunami that slammed into Japan's northeast coast, priority has been given to repairing facilities, like this one, that are needed to help deal with the disaster's human cost.

Despite severe damage to the buildings at the coastal crematorium, the roar of kerosene burners filled its cold hall last Saturday for the first time since the disaster.

A bereaved family carefully placed charred bone fragments of two brothers onto silver trays using ceremonial chopsticks, while marks on the walls showed where seawater rose to the ceiling two weeks earlier.

The sensitivities of the family members attending Saturday's cremation had to contend with further repair work, as workmen drilled holes and hammered broken plaster off the walls.

The bodies of Ren Kashiwagi, 19, and his little brother, Itaru, 16, were found in a swamped field close to their home, nearly a week after the tsunami surged into Natori city.

Their parents, two remaining brothers, and an elderly grandmother silently passed the scorched bones to a master of ceremonies who placed them in funeral urns wrapped in orange cloth.

"After we have finished the cremation, we will be able to take the ashes with us. This gives us some peace," the boys' father, Mr Yoshinori Kashiwagi, told AFP.

Four more cremations were scheduled on the same day, and engineers were hoping that the other two furnaces in the plant would be working in about a week.

Like dozens of other towns on Japan's Pacific coast, Natori has struggled to cope with a mounting backlog of decomposing corpses, recovered from mangled cars, drowned paddyfields and flattened houses.

Japanese usually cremate their dead, and the Kashigawi family were among those fortunate enough to observe the normal rituals for the two brothers.

Others have had no choice but to watch their lost relatives buried in mass graves, with an official promise that they will be exhumed and cremated properly at a later date.

AFP