Takaichi on Monday visited one of the area’s best-equipped shelters, with cardboard beds, partitions and air-conditioning, triggering criticisms on social media that her visit distorted reality.
Meanwhile, a company that owned a general store in a collapsed shopping mall acknowledged that it had instructed two employees who were killed in a later explosion to return to the building to put sales proceeds into a safe.
Two executives of Habita, a local general store operator that had a shop inside the collapsed Aeon Mall in the town of Kashima, attended the wake Sunday of one of the two victims, 22-year-old Kurumi Otake, and apologised to her parents for the death.
Company sales manager Goji Yuse acknowledged that the company instructed the two to put sales proceeds into the safe if it was possible.
“I wish someone had stopped her,” Otake’s tearful mother told them. “My daughter is not coming back.”