More than 124,000 people are still housed in some 2,000 temporary shelters in 18 prefectures in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Providing them with temporary housing is an urgent task for the central and local governments.
An estimated 72,000 fabricated houses are needed in the three most devastated prefectures — Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima. Although the land and infrastructure ministry says that land for 52,000 temporary houses has been secured, only 30,000 units are expected to be completed by the end of May.
The difficult problem with the construction of temporary housing for disaster victims is that while most of them want to live again in the coastal areas where they had lived before the disasters, most temporary houses are outside those areas.