Ambassador fearful for Britons among the missing

David Warren has travelled to Sendai, the city closest to the earthquake’s epicentre, where consular staff have set up an operations base to help the search for survivors.

He said: “Given the scale of the disaster here, while we have no confirmed British casualties as yet, we must be prepared to hear news of them.

“It is still very early days in terms of clarifying the total numbers of people who have died.

“We have a list of British nationals who are unaccounted for, which we are working through to establish their safety.

“We are continually being contacted by people who were in the earthquake zone but are safe and well.”

More than 17,000 Britons live in Japan, mostly in the Tokyo area, which was largely unaffected by the disaster, but hundreds live along the north-east coast where entire towns were wiped out by the tsunami.

About 450 have failed to contact their families, although the Foreign Office believes 400 of these are likely to be alive and unable to send messages because of damage to communications networks.

More than 5,480 calls have been made to the Foreign Office’s emergency helpline for relatives, although a spokesman warned that it could take some time to identify British victims.

“The immediate priority for the Japanese authorities is the emergency response,” he said.

British rescue workers in one of Japan’s worst-affected cities said they remained “optimistic” they would find survivors in the disaster zones.

A 63-strong UK team, some of whom have worked on humanitarian operations in other earthquake areas such as Haiti and New Zealand, are working with US teams and sniffer dogs in the coastal city of Ofunato.

The team’s co-ordinator Alan Blatchford said: “The team hasn’t yet found any survivors, but we remain hopeful that we will be able to rescue somebody.

“There’s been occasions in the past where four, five or even six days later we’ve found survivors.”