Sharjah24 – AFP: People in Japan's northeast offered prayers and carried out searches for the missing on Friday, 11 years after an earthquake and tsunami left 18,500 people dead or unaccounted for and triggered a devastating nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.
A minute's silence was held at 2:46 pm (0546 GMT), the moment a 9.0-magnitude quake -- among the strongest ever recorded -- struck off northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011.
Japanese television showed live footage of people praying towards the ocean, as students standing on massive sea walls built to protect against large waves flew kites painted with messages of hope.
The undersea quake unleashed a deadly tsunami which wrecked entire coastal communities and set off the world's worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
There was no state-funded national ceremony this year to commemorate the lives lost, because the government has brought the annual ritual to a close now that more than a decade has passed since the disaster.
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