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Many Japanese keep cash at home, and tsunami washed it away.
A woman pushes a bicycle Sunday as a fishing boat washed away by the March 11 tsunami still blocks a road in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.
AP PHOTO
Cashboxes collected from damaged houses sit in wait at a police station in tsunami-hit Ofunato city, Iwate Prefecture, Japan.
AP PHOTO
OFUNATO, Japan — There are no cars inside the parking garage at Ofunato police headquarters. Instead, hundreds of dented metal safes, swept out of homes and businesses by last month’s tsunami, crowd the long rectangular building.
Any one of them could hold someone’s life savings.
Safes are washing up along the tsunami-battered coast, and police are trying to find their owners — a unique problem in a country in which many people, especially the elderly, still stash their cash at home. By one estimate, some $350 billion worth of yen doesn’t circulate.
There’s even a term for this hidden money in Japanese, “tansu yokin.” Or literally, “wardrobe savings.”
So the massive post-tsunami cleanup under way along hundreds of miles of Japan’s ravaged northeastern coast involves the delicate business of separating junk from valuables. As workers and residents pick through the wreckage, they are increasingly stumbling upon cash and locked safes.
One month after the March 11 tsunami devastated Ofunato and other nearby cities, police departments already stretched thin now face the growing task of managing lost wealth.
“At first we put all the safes in the station,” said Noriyoshi Goto, head of the Ofunato Police Department’s financial affairs department, which is in charge of lost-and-found items. “But then there were too many, so we had to move them.”
Goto couldn’t specify how many safes his department has collected so far, saying only that there were “several hundreds” with more coming in every day.
Identifying the owners of lost safes is hard enough. But it’s nearly impossible when it comes to wads of cash being found in envelops, unmarked bags, boxes and furniture.
Yasuo Kimura, 67, considers himself one of the lucky ones. The tsunami swallowed and gutted his home in Onagawa, about 50 miles south of Ofunato. He escaped with his 90-year-old father and the clothes on his back. But he still has money in the bank.
That’s not the case for many of his longtime friends and acquaintances, said Kimura, a former bank employee.
“I spent my career trying to convince them to deposit their money in a bank,” he said, staring out at his flattened city. “They always thought it was safer to keep it at home.”
The number of safes that have turned up in Ofunato alone is a reflection of the area’s population: In Iwate prefecture where this Pacific fishing town is located, nearly 30 percent of the population is over 65.
Many of them keep money at home out of habit and convenience, said Koetsu Saiki of the Miyagi Prefectural Police’s financial affairs department. This practice is likely compounded by persistently low interest rates, leaving little financial incentive for depositing money in a bank.
As in Iwate, local police stations in Miyagi are reporting “very high numbers” of safes and cash being turned in.
“It’s just how people have operated their entire lives,” he said. “When they need money, they’d rather have their money close by. It’s not necessarily that they don’t trust banks. But there are a lot of people who don’t feel comfortable using ATMs, especially the elderly.”
A 2008 report by Japan’s central bank estimated that more than a third of 10,000-yen ($118) banknotes issued don’t actually circulate. That amounts to some 30 trillion yen, or $354 billion at current exchange rates, ferreted away.
The government has estimated that the cost of the earthquake and tsunami could reach $309 billion, making it the world’s most expensive natural disaster on record. The figure includes direct losses from damaged houses, roads and utilities. But it doesn’t take into account individual losses from home-held cash washed away by the powerful waves.
With more than 25,000 people believed to have died in the tsunami, many safes could go unclaimed. Under Japanese law, authorities must store found items for three months. If the owner does not appear within that time, the finder is entitled to the item, unless it contains personal identification such as an address book.
If neither owner nor finder claims it, the government takes possession.
But all those who survived and are seeking to retrieve savings will need to offer proof. That proof could include opening the safe and providing identification that matches any documents inside, said Akihiro Ito, a spokesman for the disaster response unit in Kesennuma, among the worst-hit cities in Miyagi prefecture.
Cold, hard cash is more complicated.
“Even if we receive 50,000 yen ($589) in cash, and someone comes in saying they’ve lost 50,000 yen, it’s nearly impossible to prove exactly whose money we actually have,” said Saiki, of Miyagi’s police force.
Only 10 to 15 percent of valuables found in the tsunami rubble have been returned so far, officials in Miyagi and Iwate prefectures said this week.
Instead of waiting, police in Iwate are considering a more proactive measure. Individual stations will likely start opening safes to try to identify their owners, said Kiyoto Fujii, a spokesman for the prefectural police.
And the safes are likely to keep on coming.
Other developments
• Prime Minister Naoto Kan paid another visit to Japan’s tsunami-devastated coast, promising officials in a fishing-dependent city that his government will do whatever it can to help.
Kan visited Ishinomaki, a coastal city of 163,000 people in Miyagi, one of the prefectures (states) hardest hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that killed as many as 25,000 people, destroyed miles of coastline and left tens of thousands homeless.
• Japanese and U.S. troops fanned out along the coast in another all-out search for bodies by land, air and sea. Television news showed them using heavy equipment to lift a boat washed inland by the tsunami so they could search a crushed car underneath. No one was inside.
•Only 13,000 deaths have been confirmed so far, and many bodies have likely washed out to sea and will never be found.
A similar three-day search with even more troops a week ago found just 70 bodies, underscoring the difficulties of locating victims in the ocean and the debris along the coast.
• The pumping of less-contaminated water into the ocean from a storage facility was set to end Sunday, and officials hoped that within days they could start transferring the more highly contaminated water to the now-drained facility. The operation is risky because the water will be transferred through a hose snaking around the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex, meaning that if there are cracks or leaks in the hose, radiation could escape.
Workers at the nuclear complex have spent the past month frantically trying to stop radiation spewing from nuclear reactors by restoring the cooling systems, but they still have a long way to go.