A land ministry panel has hammered out a basic infrastructure plan to brace Tokyo for a huge tsunami projected to strike on a 1,000-year cycle, ministry officials said.
The panel, part of the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry's Kanto Regional Development Bureau, will publicize details of the policies on March 6, the ministry officials said.
The panel called for measures more rigorous than those revised by its Central Disaster Prevention Council last year, which focus on evacuation steps for the 1,000-year tsunami, and on measures to reinforce structures against the type of tsunami that only strike every 100 years or so.
Tatsuhiko Ikeda, a professor at Yokohama National University who heads the panel, said that if Tokyo Bay, a key economic center, suffers damage, it would also impact Japan as a whole, calling for disaster preventive measures against tsunami bigger than those on which the government plan for the entire country is based.
The ministry panel, consisting of experts and officials of the Tokyo, Ibaraki, Chiba and Kanagawa prefectural governments, has been working out the basic policies since last September.