Disasters put stress on children in Japan

Twenty-two-year-old mother Yoko Kamata sits with her baby Yuzuyu (left) and son Seiga (right) at a shelter in Kamaishi city in Iwate prefecture. -- PHOTO: AFP

KARAKUWA (Japan) - ZOOM in for a snapshot of apparent normalcy: children sitting in a circle, clasping playing cards tightly in their hands. They laugh, chat and occasionally hop up to break into a goofy dance.

Zoom out and the picture changes: The children are kneeling on mattresses in a chilly classroom they now call home. An elderly woman cries nearby, wondering whether her mother was killed by Japan's tsunami. Outside the school, a teacher fiddles with a radiation detector, checking to ensure the levels aren't high enough to make them sick - or worse.

Behind the smiling faces of thousands of children in shelters across this wave-battered wasteland, experts say there is often serious anxiety as everything these youngsters once held as normal is suddenly anything but.

'That's what is so wonderfully adaptive about children. They can move very easily into playing or laughing,' says psychologist Susie Burke, a disaster response specialist with the Australian Psychological Society. 'But that's not saying they're not deeply distressed and upset about what's going on.'

Reminders of the tiniest victims are scattered throughout the wreckage: a little girl's white shoe caked in mud, a red rubber ball coated in dust, a sodden comic book whose ink has run.

As many as 25,000 people may have been killed in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan's north-east coast and damaged a nuclear plant, sending radiation spewing into the environment. Tens of thousands are still living in shelters. -- AP