by Toni Hiroshi

Aid still has not reached many areas. Children and elderly people could die from lack of water, medicine, heating. Night temperatures below freezing. Message from the Bishop of Osaka to all Catholics appealing for solidarity. The difficulties of the Anglican Church. The country stops for a minute's silence in memory of the dead. Efforts to cool the reactors at the nuclear plant.

Tokyo (AsiaNews) - "The emerging nuclear danger of Fukushima risks overshadowing the plight of  survivors of the earthquake and tsunami in the northeast of the country" is the bitter consideration that some Japanese Catholics make to AsiaNews .

By the hour "reports and confusion is growing on how they are trying to lower the temperature at the Fukushima reactors, but rescue teams have not yet arrived in many tsunami-affected areas. The people, especially elderly and children, are likely to die because they lack everything: water, electricity, food, medicine, and coupled with this night temperature are dropping below zero. "

The aid centre of the Catholic Diocese of Sendai, in collaboration with Caritas, has begun its work. It is raising funds for earthquake victims to rebuild destroyed churches. The centre also is preparing a plan to distribute aid and volunteers to different areas of the diocese, but roads are impassable because of debris making travel difficult. The centre will operate for at least six months and Caritas Japan has already received donations for nearly  250,000 U.S. dollars.

The Archbishop of Osaka, Mgr. Leo Ikenaga, president of the Bishops' Conference of Japan, today sent a message to all the dioceses asking all Catholics to show solidarity towards those who are suffering and who have lost loved ones and their homes. He asks the faithful to do everything possible to especially help those who lack food and medicine, with prayers and donations.

In the midst of great difficulties and ongoing emergencies, the Japanese have rediscovered a lost sense of solidarity. Today across the country, a week after the disaster, there was a minute's silence. "It was a powerful experience - says Fr David Uribe, a missionary of Guadalupe in Tokyo - to see children, young and old bow their head and unite in prayer for the pain of this country. "

Other churches also have huge problems. The Anglican Bishop of Tohoku, the Rev. John Hiromichi Kato, told Christian Today that so far the exact number of the faithful dead, or the extent of the damage to buildings and churches is unknown. "The tsunami and fires - he says - has left us in misery. We were not at all prepared for a problem of this dimension”.

The death toll has grown, exceeding those of the Kobe earthquake of 1995: the dead now stand at nearly 7 thousand more than 10 thousand are missing and there are more than 2500 injured.

Meanwhile, the emergency at the nuclear plant in Fukushima continues, where all day soldiers and firefighters battle to lower the temperature of the reactors using water tankers. Their efforts however so far have failed to achieved the desired results. Other workers, volunteers, are reconnecting power lines in the hope of restoring the cooling systems.

The real heroes of the situation are the 50 engineers who work in the power plant, exposed to radiation and working at a rhythm of 10 minute shifts to avoid overheating and overexposure.

U.S. Army personnel, who are keeping the plant under surveillance with unmanned aircraft, say they are "cautiously optimistic" that the damage to the reactors can be contained. Meanwhile, today the government has increased the severity of the accident to 5 (it was 4 out of a scale of 1 to 7). The decision was taken after the arrival of the head of the IAEA, Japanese Yukiya Amano, who demanded  "more accurate and faster information" from Tokyo.

• Japan
• earthquake
• victims
• tsunami
• fukushima
• catholic
• church
• Anglican
• church