Japan to send another quake-relief team to N.Z.

TOKYO, Feb. 28 Kyodo - Japan will dispatch to earthquake-hit New Zealand by Tuesday a second disaster-relief team consisting of 30 people, half the size of its current mission of 66 people already in the country, Foreign Ministry officials said Monday.
The new members will take over the rescue operations that the first emergency aid unit began in the country's second-largest city of Christchurch last Thursday, according to the officials.
Japan will reduce the number of rescuers to 30 as New Zealand authorities have decided to shorten relief operations to daytime only. About 200 people remain unaccounted for in the quake-hit area.
Five police experts involved in victim identification and a psychiatrist from Japan, working separately from the disaster-relief team, will remain in Christchurch, the officials added.
Meanwhile, Kento Okuda, a 19-year-old Toyama school student who had his right leg amputated to free him from the debris after the quake, returned to Japan on an Air New Zealand plane which arrived at Narita airport near Tokyo on Monday afternoon.
Okuda told Toyama city officials who greeted him at the airport that he was relieved to be back in Japan but was worried about other Japanese students from Toyama College of Foreign Languages who remain unaccounted for.
After arrival, he was taken in a vehicle for patient transportation to a hospital in Tokyo where he is scheduled to stay.
Okuda was at the fourth-floor cafeteria in the CTV building, where he was attending the King's Education language school, when the earthquake struck Feb. 22, reducing the building to rubble. He was rescued about 12 hours later.
The plane also carried back to Japan 42 female students from a junior high school in Tochigi Prefecture who had been studying English in New Zealand.
Chie Tanaka, 19, another student of the Toyama school who survived the earthquake, also returned from New Zealand.