Japanese elderly suffer hardest shocks in quake - International Herald Tribune

Japanese elderly suffer hardest shocks in quake - International Herald Tribune: "'The earthquake hurt a lot of old people because we couldn't move fast enough to escape,' Shimizu said Wednesday, sitting between groups of people camped out on the gym floor. 'It's hard for old people after the earthquake is over, too.'

Earthquakes have long been a fact of life in natural disaster-prone Japan, but tremors this week exposed a growing new challenge facing the nation's crisis planners. All 10 of the people killed, and many of the thousands left homeless, were older than 65, reflecting the rising vulnerabilities of one of the world's most rapidly aging societies."