Tokyo, July 16.
ME hundred and thirty-three dead and missing, 3,394 injured, 1,276 houses flooded, property damage, Y.420,000,000.
These statistics on human suffering, read by Admiral Nobumasa Suetsugu, the Home Minister, at yesterday's Cabinet meeting gave the Ministers a detailed picture of the appalling havoc wrought by the recent flood in central and western Japan.
Starting almost unnoticed in a slight rainfall and the overflowing of a few small streams, the flood spread over an ever widening territory for seven days and became a major disaster calling for an extensive relief programme, When the unleashed waters finally stopped their course of destruction they had covered 420,000 hectares of fields, many of them the fertile lands whose crops spell prosperity or poverty for the farmer, Property damage in Hyogo Prefecture alone, including Kobe, the populous shipping centre of Japan, amounted to Y.270,000,000, Admiral Suetsugu revealed.
Four other prefectures—Ibaragi, Nagano, Shizusaka and Tokyo—suffered damage totalling Y.150,000,000. In all at least 9,124 houses were destroyed or washed away.
Surrounded by water for days, Kobe experienced a shortage of drinking water as the waterworks was partly put out of commission by the seeping tide. Waterworks service was resumed in Kobe on July 14, Admiral Suetsugu said, Powers Involved in
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