A dentist's role: prevention of snoring at temporary refuges for victims of the East Japan earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident on March 11, 2011.

Dear Editors, As a Japanese dentist, I (ST) would like to express my sincere thanks for all of the heartfelt messages and warm encouragement from all over the world after the recent Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The people of Japan greatly appreciate the strong support received from many countries. On March 11, I was at my office in Yoyogi, Tokyo throughout the afternoon. At 2:46 p.m., I felt a small earthquake. However, I quickly became slightly scared because it did not stop soon. Suddenly, the vibrations from the earthquake greatly increased, and this continued for nearly a minute. All of the books fell from the shelf, even PC monitors easily fell down, and I heard people outside screaming. It was the biggest earthquake that I had ever experienced. Fortunately, lifelines were fine in the Tokyo area although the railways went out of service immediately after the event. While some people gave up going home, others (myself included) decided to walk home. My 3-h walk home turned out not bad at all when I later realized that many people struggled with more than an 8or 10-h walk. Fortunately, my family was fine, but I was really shocked when I watched the television. An incredible tsunami had hit the extensive area of Tohoku, northeastern part of Japan. The announcer reported that approximately 300 corpses had been found on the beach at Sendai, but nobody knew how many people were really missing. Coastal villages and towns were completely destroyed. Another unbelievable piece of news was that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had been severely damaged due to the greater than 10 m height of the tsunami. As of June 11, 2011 (i.e., 3 months after the disaster), more than 15,000 people have lost their lives and 8,000 people are still missing. Eighty-eight thousand evacuees are being forced to live in schools, hospitals, hotels, gymnasiums, temporary housing, or acquaintances’ or friends’ houses. My dentist friends who survived the earthquake and tsunami have been devoting themselves to the task of identifying who is who one by one from a number of corpses, by examining the number of teeth, prosthetic status, and so on. Although the tsunami blew away most of the charts together with dental offices themselves, any surviving dental records such as oral photographs are absolutely critical for their work. One dentist e-mailed me that “it is a quite physically but much more mentally tough work. Volunteer dentists have to continue their work just S. Tsuiki (*) :K. Maeda Division of Dental Sleep Medicine, Japan Somnology Center, Neuropsychiatric Research Institute, 1-24-10 Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku, 1510053, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: tsuiki@somnology.com