Search for missing continues in Japan as death toll rises
By the CNN Wire Staff

Tokyo (CNN) -- As searches for thousands of missing continued Saturday, police in Japan said more than 7,300 people had died since the monster earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck last week.
On Saturday evening, 7,348 people were confirmed dead, according to Japan's National Police Agency. An additional 10,947 people were missing and 2,603 were injured, the agency said.
Search and rescue efforts have been hampered by snowfall in the hardest-hit areas, said spokesman Patrick Fuller of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
"The cold is a real issue, particularly for the thousands of people in shelters, many of them elderly," he said, describing providing medical care as a "massive challenge."

While efforts accelerated Saturday to restore power to cooling systems at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the focus shifted toward rebuilding in some parts of the country hardest hit by the temblor and the devastating wall of water that followed.
"We need to go forward," Rikuzentakata Mayor Futoshi Toba told construction workers, according to Kyodo News.
Crews began building hundreds of temporary, pre-fabricated housing units in the coastal city, the agency said.
A widely reported rescue Saturday offered a brief glimmer of hope amid headlines of death and destruction. But Japanese authorities later changed their story, saying a man rescued from the rubble of his home Saturday had actually been staying in a shelter.
Originally, the Japanese Self-Defense Force reported that the man had been trapped for eight days.
Meanwhile, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. said workers had laid extensive electrical cable near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant's No. 2 nuclear reactor -- a key step in an effort to restore power to the plant in an effort authorities hope will keep temperatures low. That would curb the emission of radioactive material and, in a worst case scenario, a full nuclear meltdown.
Tokyo's fire department also began a new method of spraying water in and around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant's No. 3 reactor using an unmanned system that can spray seawater for up to seven hours at a time. In previous missions, firefighters, soldiers and plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. workers had manually done the same in brief intervals to avoid prolonged radiation exposure.
Tests revealed abnormally high levels of radiation that violate Japanese food safety laws in samples of spinach and milk from areas near the nuclear plant, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters Saturday.
Authorities are mulling regulating movement of agricultural products from the area, as well as collecting more data for analysis, Edano said.
On Friday, authorities acknowledged that the situation at the troubled power plant was far more serious than they'd originally estimated.

Tokyo Electric's managing director, Akio Komiri, broke down in a tears after leaving a news conference in Fukushima at which exposure levels were discussed.
In a written statement, the company's president Masataka Shimizu said "we sincerely apologize ... for causing such a great concern and nuisance."
Even as the country's emergency agency raised its rating of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant from a 4 to 5 -- putting it on par with the 1979 incident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island -- Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan told his compatriots to bury their pessimism Friday.
"With a tsunami and earthquake we don't have any room to be pessimistic," he said. "We are going to create Japan again from scratch. We should face this challenge together."
Kan acknowledged the situation at the Fukushima plant remains "very grave" and said his government has disclosed all that it knows to both the Japanese people and the international community.
"The police, fire department and self defense forces are all working together, putting their lives on the line, in an attempt to resolve the situation," he said.
Meanwhile, the government raised the radiation level for workers trying to avert a further crisis, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported Saturday.
Tokyo Electric said workers at the plant -- including company employees, members of the military and firefighters -- can now be exposed to 250 millisieverts of radiation before they must leave the area.
An individual in a developed country is naturally exposed to about 3 millisieverts of radiation a year. The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends no more than 50 millisieverts exposure in a given year for nuclear rescue and recovery workers. It offers no restriction in a crisis when "the benefit to others clearly outweighs the rescuer's risk."
Tokyo Electric has said it was doing all it can to protect workers' health. Japan's nuclear agency said Friday several hundred workers, including nonpower company employees, remained on site.
In populated areas outside of the nuclear facility, there have been few indications of any immediate, dangerous fall-out from the crisis so far. For the past eight days, weather patterns indicate that the wind has likely blown most emitted radiation out to sea.


CNN's Yoko Wakatsuki contributed to this report.