Japanese Records

At the time it was the last thing that anyone cared about because the people of Minami-Sanriku were scrambling for their lives. But at some point when the tsunami engulfed the town hall, a computer server fizzled and expired.
An entire town of 17,000 people had been washed away, along with its municipal buildings, all their contents and all electronic and paper records.
Apart from being physically obliterated, Minami-Sanriku suffered another death — it had been bureaucratically erased. All the local tax records and citizenship lists have been wiped out. Most important of all the family registers, which are the basic form of identification in Japan, have gone.
The first two can probably be recovered from regional and national databases, but the only back up of the family registers was left in the town hall, which is now a tangle of girders.
“The guy who was supposed to retrieve it is kicking himself,” said Hiyotaka Miura, a spokesman for the town office, which has relocated to a hilltop gymnasium. “But it’s very serious. Now we don’t even know who the people of this town are.”
Eleven days after the earthquake and tsunami the stricken towns of northeast Japan are making slow progress. No one is starving but they have only just enough food, and a chronic lack of everything from hot water to clean clothing. Fuel shortages are slowing down every aspect of the relief effort.
The recovery is also suffering from administrative paralysis, which is creating confusion about the most basic fact of any disaster — the death toll. Figures from the police yesterday estimated 8,805 dead and 12,652 missing. Minami-Sanriku can account for only 9,800 of its 17,431 citizens; in Rikuzen-Takata, further up the coast, the number of missing is 10,000, and similar figures are reported for other towns. The truth is that the final toll could range from 10,000 to several times that.
People with money, friends or families in other cities, may have decamped to hotels or other parts of Japan without checking in with the local authorities, and it could be weeks before this is clear. “We only know about those in the official evacuation centres,” Mr Miura said. “The other 7,000 could be staying elsewhere, but many of them may be dead.”
Even in towns which have saved or backed up their records, the bureaucratic problems are enormous. Many civil servants were lost in the tsunami. The Minami-Sanriku town hall lists 38 of its 230 staff among the missing.
Surprising numbers of Japanese people keep their savings at home in cash, and many have lost family register documents, safes, bank books and, crucially, the hanko or name stamps, which take the place of signatures on official documents. Tomoaki Abe, a headmaster, hopes that bank clerks will give him access to his account because they know his face.


A sadder possibility arises from the loss of the records. Some of the victims may never be identified not only because they are dead but because there is no record that they ever lived.