Japan Needs Better Tsunami İnfrastructure:Expert

Japan should invoke Western-style urban planning to keep houses and hospitals further from the coast as it rebuilds from the crippling disaster, said Fumihiko Imamura, a professor at Tohoku University's Disaster Control Research Center.

Japan's cash-strapped government has moved away in recent years from costly projects such as increasing the height of sea walls to budget measures like producing maps that show which areas are at lower sea levels, he said.

"We cooperate with the government on tsunami countermeasures, but there has been less financing and sometimes there isn't enough for the construction of structural measures," Imamura said in an interview on Sunday.

"Now, the government's focus has shifted to non-structural measures, because they are cheaper."

Imamura, a scientist who has been studying tsunami for nearly 30 years, uses computer models based on historical data to predict the speed and size of the deadly waves caused by earthquakes.

The tsunami that savaged Japan's northeast coast on March 11 was one of the largest in recorded history and far bigger than anything anticipated by scientists because they did not expect such a massive earthquake, he said.

The disaster killed more than 10,000 in the world's third-biggest economy and nearly 17,500 are missing.

The waves were so big that they destroyed several of the tidal gauges used to measure wave size. The tsunami itself lasted as long as two days, as its waves reached as far as Chile before being reflected back to Japan, he said.