An awful realisation is setting in for those trapped in the vicinity of the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex: people are afraid to help them.
Residents describe spooky scenes of municipal cars driving down near-empty streets telling people to stay indoors, but they have seen few other signs of outside help.
Aid agencies are reluctant to get too close to the plant. Shelters set up in the greater Fukushima area for "radiation refugees" have little food, in part because nobody wants to deliver to an area that might be contaminated. And with little or no petrol available, not everyone who wants to leave can get out.
Radiation fears are mingling with a sickening sense of abandonment.
"People who don't have family nearby, who are old or sick in bed, or couldn't get petrol, they haven't been able to get away from the radiation," said Emi Shinkawa, who feels doubly vulnerable. Her house was swept away by the tsunami.
Her daughter, Tomoko Monma, knows she is lucky: At 9am on Wednesday, she piled her family into the car, thankful for her husband's foresight in setting aside enough petrol for them to make their escape.
But she is angry that people living outside the 20-kilometre evacuation zone around the nuclear plant were not given help finding public transport or the fuel to drive away in their own cars. Ms Monma, 28, lives 33 kilometres from the plant.
"We've got no help. We've got no information," she said as she cradled her two-year-old daughter on the tatami mats that had been laid out in a sports centre in Yamagata, 160 kilometres inland, which now serves as a shelter for people fleeing Fukushima.
"The government is demanding that we don't go out, but it isn't bringing us anything," Katsunobu Sakurai, the mayor of a city close to the exclusion zone, complained in an interview with the national NHK television network. "Truck drivers don’t want to enter the city. They’re afraid of being exposed to radiation ... If the government says we’re in a dangerous area, it should take more care of us!"
Foreign aid workers in the area have been assessing the radiation risks, but many chose to remain just outside the 20-kilometre zone yesterday morning.