Friday, May 13, 2011

[Japan] Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko marked the two-month anniversary of the March 11 disasters in simple fashion

Empress Michiko visits a devastated area on the two-month anniversary of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, with Emperor Akihito in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture on May 11.

Displaced residents in evacuation centers and relief workers in the battered towns of Tohoku gathered to observe a minute’s silence at 2:46 p.m., the moment when the country’s biggest-ever earthquake occurred two months earlier.

Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited Fukushima prefecture Wednesday in their latest trip to the disaster zone to pass on messages of support. The country’s biggest daily paper, the broadsheet Yomiuri, printed an updated list of the names of those confirmed dead since April 8, the last time it published this list, which fills three pages with very small print.

With the news cycle having rolled on many times since Japan marked the one-month anniversary, international attention has inevitably shifted elsewhere, be it to civil protests in the Middle East, tornadoes in the southern U.S. or the killing of Osama bin Laden.

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