Japan's tsunami recovery stalls

"They said they were waiting for the central government's reconstruction plan," she explains. "We are helpless."

Farther north, in the tiny fishing port of Ozashi, nestled in a startlingly beautiful cliff-lined cove, seaweed farmer Hiroshi Abe has run into a similar problem – the often rigid Japanese bureaucracy.

Like fishermen up and down the coast, Mr. Abe lost his boat in the tsunami.

Taking matters into their own hands

When the government set aside 19.8 billion yen ($24.75 million) in its first post-disaster budget last April to help fishermen buy new boats, Abe went to the local office of Japan Fisheries, the parastatal cooperative that runs the nation's marine industry, to apply for compensation.

"I was asking all the time how to apply, but nobody at the office knew," he complains. "They just told me to wait" until they got instructions, which arrived after two months.

"There's a strict hierarchy, from the central government to the prefecture to the city to my branch of Japan Fisheries," he explains. "It takes a long time for orders to be passed down."

Abe is about to move from the cramped community center where he has been living since March with two dozen other villagers into one of 15 prefabricated "minihouses" nearby. If they had waited for the local government to allocate and clear land for the temporary homes "it would have taken a long time," he says. So three families donated their private land, and villagers rounded up volunteers to help clear and level it themselves.

It is a similar sense of initiative that has propelled Yoshiaki Kanno to reopen his family's tofu business – the oldest tofu factory in Sendai, he says proudly.

Mr. Kanno's home burned down after the earthquake, but his small factory next door survived, even if all the machinery was rendered unusable by the seawater that rose above head height.

"I thought I'd have to close, but my younger sister told me I had to keep the business going," he says. "And when I was living in an emergency shelter I met a lot of customers who encouraged me to start again."

So he claimed his earthquake insurance, took out a private bank loan, dug into his savings, and scraped together enough money to rehabilitate the factory and buy secondhand machinery from other tofu manufacturers who had gone out of business after the earthquake.

On a recent afternoon he was busy supervising electricians who were hooking up the machines. He was planning his first production-line test run a few days later.

"If I had depended on government money it would have been impossible to do this," he says. "The government is so slow."

Kanno is one of the fortunate few to have insured his business against earthquakes, and to have a sympathetic bank manager, along with some savings. He is also blessed with self-confidence: "If you believe strongly enough, you can do it," he says.

But he acknowledges that he is unusual. "Why are there still so few signs of recovery?" he asks rhetorically: "Because of the shortage of finance. A lot of business owners I know are very depressed. They just don't have the motivation to start again."

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