Essential services aren’t functioning properly in the city of Sendai yet, and food is being rationed right across northern Japan. Elsewhere, people are cooperating with the government’s request to save electricity – the grid is damaged and generation capacity is reduced – so that some power can be redirected north. Everybody understands we won’t even know exactly what’s happened, and what needs to be done about it, for months. Right now, we don’t even know properly who’s gone in the earthquake and the tsunami. The lists of the known dead and the presumed missing may not be confirmed for weeks, if ever.

The big one was nearly a 9 on the Richter scale, one of the strongest in recorded history: even its many aftershocks, at 6 or 7, would count as serious quakes anywhere else. There are rumours of a bigger quake on its way but, scientifically, aftershocks are what we are likely to get; and perhaps Miyagi prefecture really knows that, as it knew to expect a “big one” about every 30 years. “You know, they talk about that ‘big one’ any time there is even a tiny quake around here,” said Akira Mizuno, a local businessman, as he cleared up the damage to his izakaya (bar/restaurant). “But I don’t think they had any idea it could be so big. Hopefully, now people can just keep quiet about it.”

After the tsunami – more deadly and devastating, three storeys high and moving at 80 km an hour – there is nothing to do but pick up the pieces where there remain any pieces to be picked up. Outside the disaster area, all people do is shake their heads and say how terrible it is. There’s not much else you can say.

Simultaneously with rumours about the next big one came news of the nuclear emergency at Fukushima. Chain emails started going around (where there was power) warning people not to go outside in the radioactive “black rain” – the term goes back to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People stopped going out in the rain, but still had to queue for hours for something, anything, to eat. The government, and scientists, first said that, despite fire, steam and exposure of fissile material, radiation levels didn’t threaten human life. Then they qualified that by warning that, in some places, radiation in tap water, milk and green crops was above normal. People in Sendai are still walking about in face-masks. “It’s annoying,” says Arisa Chiba, a computer saleswoman in Sendai, “but I’m not taking any stupid risks until I know more.”

They are worried that the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) have downplayed the situation. This is true; but foreign governments and news sources upplayed it too far – the US decision to evacuate US citizens worried locals, as did the similar French move – if the nuclear-proficient French were alarmed, then surely it was serious? The Japanese are uncomfortable with nuclear power in their crowded archipelago, but are much calmer about it than the foreign news media. I was helping out in a disaster refuge centre in Sendai, and a man I know, Mr Satoh, who is 90 and a native of Hiroshima, wryly told me that the “gods were angry”. He was talking about the tsunami, not irradiated spinach. When Hiroshima was bombed, he was far away in China with the Japanese army.

Like others in Sendai, he’s focusing on dealing with the damage nature has done, not the damage nuclear fission might do, though of course it’s a concern. The situation at Fukushima was almost immediately incorporated into the calm and orderly public manner typical in Japan: TV news presenters coolly explained developments using diagrams, graphics and cardboard models. It was their way of contributing to the country’s efforts to maintain social discipline and public composure, which in turn were expected to help restore essential services and keep life, and the economy, going. Collections have started (they’ve had a generous response); people have volunteered to come and help reconstruction in Sendai.

And we have heroes: the 50 modern “nuclear” samurai who are still working at the Fukushima power plant, trying everything anybody can think of to prevent meltdown. There is concern that many of them were not qualified for this kind of work, yet they are always stoic. After all, someone has to pick up the pieces.