Survivors' lives two months on

Survivors of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan say they still face difficulties in their daily lives 2 months on.

NHK surveyed 435 people living in evacuation centers and elsewhere in the hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima.

More than 450,000 people were living in shelters just after the quake, but the number has now dropped to about 120,000. Many evacuees left the shelters saying they were tired of living in groups. Some facilities were closed or merged.

Asked what bothered them the most, 38 percent of those in the shelters cited a lack of privacy.

32 percent of the people living in their homes cited not being able to bathe and a lack of utilities as their main concern.

34 percent of those staying with relatives or living in apartments said the lack of access to information, including notices from their municipalities, is a problem.

One woman in Rikuzentakata city, Iwate Prefecture, said she is living at home because her father refused to stay in a shelter. She said the water and electricity are still off and that she can only bathe once every 4 or 5 days at facilities provided by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces.

Tsunami flow upstream in Chiba Prefecture river

A camera on an NHK helicopter captured images of tsunami waves flowing upstream near the mouth of a river in Kamogawa, Chiba Prefecture, at around 2:50 PM on Sunday.

The same phenomenon was observed after a major earthquake that hit central Japan in 1983 and a massive quake that struck off Tokachi in Japan's northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido in 2003.

Associate Professor Yoshinobu Tsuji of the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute says tsunami-triggered rapid fluctuations in tide levels may have caused the tsunami to flow upstream.

The expert says tsunami waves could travel upstream for several kilometers, capsizing boats.

He says he has never heard of this happening in a river in the Kanto regio