Amazing pics. And I am with ya on "where to begin". My family and people at the lake kinda felt this (albeit at a vastly smaller scale) when cleaning up after the storm, but you just focus on one thing and chip away at it. Same principle applies here, but the scale is just so overwhelming that despair must be near impossible to avoid. It looks like they have cleared streets and are working on the cities block by block, so there is progress...but the open areas look like they need every piece of heavy machinery on the planet to get it hauled off. The article says years before those two cities are cleaned up, yeah, by the end of the decade maybe. But I'll say one thing about the Japanese, they are resilient people and I have no doubt they'll get it done. I tip my hat off to them and I still try to remember to throw a prayer in for them.
Good post Pan, good reminder of what they're dealing with.