Japanese authorities should create more children's play areas in temporary housing zones set up for March 2011 disaster evacuees, according to landscape experts in Britain and Japan.

Helen Woolley, a chartered landscape architect at Sheffield University in England, warned that not enough thought was given to the needs of youngsters when the housing units were erected.

On a fact-finding mission to devastated areas in the Tohoku region, she discovered that temporary homes often had been erected upon playgrounds, and that large areas were given over to the construction of residents' parking lots with nowhere for children to play.