Many people are still living under inconvenient conditions more than a month after a major earthquake hit Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture on March 25, killing one person and injuring more than 300. In the city of Wajima, the hardest-hit municipality, more than 1,000 houses were either destroyed or damaged. Some 260 people are still sheltering in emergency evacuation facilities in and around Wajima. The central and local governments need to take long-range reconstruction measures, including preferential tax and financial measures to rebuild houses.

The earthquake hit a depopulated area as in the case of the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake of October 2004, which devastated the village of Yamakoshi (now part of the city of Nagaoka). Wajima is one of the 739 municipalities classified as depopulated as of April 2006, where people aged 65 or over accounted for 27 percent of the population on average.

Special care, especially health-related, is needed for aged people remaining in evacuation facilities. Depopulated municipalities need to prepare themselves to assist the elderly when disasters strike in the future. For example, they can strengthen and make operational an existing system to register elderly people, especially those living alone, and designate people who can help them in the event of a disaster.