China is willing to assist the relief mission, said Cheng in a statement after he visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, in which he also sent the deepest condolences to the people of Japan.
The Chinese embassy established a 24-hour hotline on Friday afternoon and sent a task force immediately to the earthquake-hit regions. The safety status of Chinese citizens in Japan is updated every hour at the embassy's official website.
Gao Ye, a 26-year-old Chinese student studying science in Tohoku University in Sendai, very close to the epicenter, told China Daily he and several Chinese colleagues in the same lab had reached the embassy and their families via short cell-phone messages through intermittent signals in that area.
"We have been evacuated to the playground and settled there safely," he said.
According to statistics, around 700,000 Chinese nationals are now studying or working in Japan. As of Saturday afternoon, there were no death or injury cases of Chinese overseas students reported, according to the embassy.
"The residents are calm and busy in offering help to each other. I am very impressed with that," said Ma Jia, a Chinese female overseas student in Tokyo, saying that when she talked with China Daily reporter on Internet the government staff and local residents were helping with the distribution of food and water.
"Many supermarkets in Tokyo closed down after the earthquake and products for emergency were nearly sold out", she said.
Tokyo Electric Power Co warned Saturday of blackouts in a wide area of Japan, not only in quake-hit areas, as electricity is in short supply after its power facilities were damaged.
"We are asked by the government to save electricity," said Wei Jie, a 22-year-old Chinese graduate student studying chemistry in Tokyo University.
"Telephone and mobile services in Tokyo were still unstable and I kept contact with my family in China through the Internet," said Wei.
There were 4,578 Chinese tourists in Japan at the time of the quake, according to China's National Tourism Administration (NTA). All of them had contacted domestic travel agencies, with no death or injury reported, said the NTA upon information from local tourism authorities.
The NTA has also called for travel agencies to protect the security of Chinese tourists in Japan and keep in touch with the Chinese embassy and consulates in Japan, as well as China's tourism authorities.
"None of my group members had ever experienced such a big earthquake," said Yang Bei, guide for a 24-tourist group that was at Disney Land of Tokyo when the quake happened. The group landed in Beijing airport on Saturday afternoon, with no one injured.
"We were immediately properly guided to big open squares by Disney staff," she said.
As Chinese tour agencies started bringing back tourists, many trips to Japan had been called off.
A total of seven JAL and ANA airplanes suffered damage during the earthquake. More than 30 international flights operated by the two Japanese airlines were canceled at Haneda and Narita airports.
"They (the Narita Airport) opened free international calls service and provided food and blankets to passengers. It also kept broadcasting information about the deadly earthquake in Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese," said a Chinese female passenger surnamed Zou.
China Daily
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