Nearly a week after the first deadly earthquake hit central Kumamoto, concerns are rising that evacuees with disabilities or ailments are not getting the support they need.
"These people should be separated from the healthy ones, because a person with a cane cannot walk quickly enough to pick up rationed rice balls, for example," said Tatsue Yamazaki, an associate professor of disaster nursing at Tokyo Medical University who inspected the disaster zone in Kumamoto over the weekend.
"Governments should create shelters for people with special needs, including the sick, people with disabilities and pregnant women," she said. "The need for such shelters was intensively discussed after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, but local government officials I talked with in Kumamoto had no idea that such shelters were needed.