Unlike victims of earthquakes in Haiti, Indonesia or China, those suffering in Japan expect their government to work and can’t understand why a country as affluent as theirs can’t keep gasoline, the lifeblood of a modern economy, flowing and why towns across the northeast have been plunged into frigid darkness for five days.

“I never expected anything like this in modern Japan. It is like fiction,” said Yutaka Iwasawa, a 25-year-old forklift operator. With the first floor of his house under water, he and his family huddle on the second floor. They go to bed as soon as the sun goes down because it is too cold and damp to do anything else…

What riles Japanese, though, is the seeming inability of their government to get a grip on the scale of a disaster that has left about 450,000 people without homes, left thousands still uncounted for and snatched away the certainties by which tens of millions had lived their lives.

Masayoshi Funabasama, a civil engineer who lives near Ishinomaki in an area not damaged by the tsunami, fumed at official assurances that there is no need for alarm. He got up before dawn to go hunting for gasoline. “Things may look normal, but I can assure you nothing is normal,” he said. “We have no fuel, no water, no food, and we have children to take care of.”