PM: I'm here in Minami-Sanriku, which is the town that became known to the world as a heavily impacted area for the tsunami and earthquake and when you see the scenes behind me you can understand why.
We've just driven through the hills to get here and they are beautiful hills, with traditional Japanese buildings on the side of the road and then you move from those beautiful hills to the next moment seeing all of this. We can see where the tsunami had its destructive power and what it's done to these buildings and to this place.
I've just had a conversation with the Mayor, with Mayor Sato, who explained to me that he was in this building, this was actually a disaster management centre and they were in there because of the earthquake and then ran from the second floor up the stairs and onto the roof to try and survive the tsunami. Unfortunately most of the people he was with did not survive; this is the first time he's been back to this place. So, a very emotional moment for him to see this again.
I think it's telling us a lot about the force of the water, that you can see wrapped around this building a net from the ocean with all of the ocean buoys just thrown onto the building by the tsunami.
I think coming here and seeing these images is incredibly confronting, incredibly confronting to see how much damage has been done. It's like the place has just been bombed into oblivion, with so many people dead and so many people still living in evacuation centres. I am going to proceed to an evacuation centre, it's the one where Mr Sato, the Mayor, himself lives now and meet with some of the people there.
At his request, the Mayor's request, and at the request of the Japanese Government, we are making available a care package of some food and some soft toys for the children who now live in that evacuation centre, the children of this town. I'd like to thank some big Australian companies for helping us put this package together, it includes really well known Australian products, we're talking about Heinz Baked Beans and Campbell's Soup and Arnott's biscuits, Qantas has helped us get it over here and the soft toys are koalas and kangaroos for the kids.
This material has already landed in Japan and it will shortly be here, as a further expression of friendship between Australia and Japan and to provide just some relief for the kids and the people who have suffered through this amazing devastation.
JOURNALIST: Have you every personally experienced something like this before?
PM: Not on this scale, I've had the opportunity to go to the Lockyer Valley, where the flash flooding wrought such awful damage and to hear the stories of those kids who ran from the water to survive, ran for their lives literally. But the scale of this is just - it truly does just leave you speechless.
JOURNALIST: How does it make you feel when you see what's around you?
PM: Well, on one level you can't take it in, because it's just so much, but it's a scene of incredible tragedy and incredible sorrow. You just can't imagine that there could have been people in these buildings working, walking down these streets, one moment all of life is normal and everything is as you've known it and then literally within half and hour following the earthquake, the tsunami did this. It's just hard to take in, hard to imagine.
The Mayor was telling me that he clung on and survived, the people around him did not. The people who did survive, the very few went back into the building and they fortunately found one lighter, that wasn't wet and could still light. There'd been a blizzard, it was that cold and they used that one lighter and a neck tie to start a fire, otherwise they may not have survived from the cold. So, those sort of stories of human survival, it's just truly remarkable.