Quotes of the Day

By 9:30 a.m. local time on March 22, the emergency shelter at Saitama Super Arena, just north of Tokyo, had reached its maximum capacity of 500 volunteers. The other 1,500 do-gooders wanting to help the displaced people of Futaba, the town closest to ground zero of the earthquake- and tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, were turned away by volunteers holding hand-printed cardboard signs that said "We are sorry, but we cannot take any more volunteers. Please try again tomorrow."

Inside the arena, which normally hosts rock concerts, some 5,000 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear-plant refugees, including those from Futaba, were trying to carve out a normal routine in their makeshift homes, composed of squares of blankets and mats. There to help them were the volunteers, who handed out free bananas, blankets, diapers, toys and other necessities for people who escaped with little more than the clothes on their backs. Some volunteers held signs presenting complimentary day-care services, while others offered free shampoos, blow-dries and shaves at local beauty parlors. "It's the least I can do," said Hideyuki Tanaka, a stylist with dyed blond hair who held a sign offering free salon services. "I don't have any other skills except for this, so I thought I could make this small contribution." By noon, some 60 evacuees had taken advantage of free services at his Maggie Friends beauty salon.

The Saitama emergency shelter is a model of organization and goodwill, with masking-tape arrows pointing the way to the bath, food and clothing lines. Bowing, smiling volunteers shepherd dazed-looking evacuees from one line to another. But in northeastern Japan, where an estimated 21,000 are dead or missing and another 350,000 are homeless as of March 22, the country's labyrinthine bureaucracy has seriously hampered efforts to deliver aid. Some shelters still have no heat, while others are rationing rice balls. In a country that prides itself on efficiency, the fact that 11 days after the earthquake, displaced people are still hungry and, even if they have cars, cannot get food because of a shortage of fuel is a shocking turn of events. The aid bottlenecks are all the more surprising given that most Japanese anticipated that their government would respond quickly. "There are very high expectations of the government here, and civil society is struggling to find its place," says Randy Martin, director of global emergency operations for Mercy Corps, a U.S.-based NGO. "The most important thing is to get the supply chain going again."

In other natural disasters that I've covered, steady streams of local and international aid have usually converged upon the stricken area within four days of the event. This has happened even in developing-world countries with far less infrastructure than Japan has. But in Tohoku, as Japan's northeast is called, aid has trickled in agonizingly slowly, despite the mobilization of 100,000 Japanese soldiers for the relief effort. It took more than a week after the earthquake, for example, for the region's highways, which are reserved for emergency vehicles, to be filled with the kind of aid convoys that typically race to disaster scenes.

One major bottleneck has been Japan's fondness for red tape. "In special times, you have to do things in a special way," says Kensuke Kobayashi, an IBM employee in Tokyo who has tried to organize relief efforts to Tohoku from the Japanese capital. "But in Japan, there is a legal wall that stops everything." Japanese shipping company NYK offered to provide a container ship for helicopters to land on when ferrying in relief supplies to coastal areas. But the government rejected the offer because the NYK shipmates lacked the proper licenses to help with such work. After some wrangling, volunteer foreign doctors were told that because they didn't have Japanese medical licenses, they could conduct only the "minimum necessary medical procedures" in the disaster zone.

Some medicine donations from overseas haven't reached the many elderly suffering in the earthquake's aftermath because Japanese regulatory agencies have not yet given the drugs approval. Local logistics companies have complained — off the record, for fear of angering the bureaucrats whom they depend on for future licensing — of days-long waits for permission from the central government to deliver donated goods. Only when their trucks get the magic pass can they start moving toward Tohoku. Until then, the boxes of relief goods, some of which were donated just hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit, sit in Tokyo warehouses.

Then there's fuel, which is in plentiful supply in southern Japan but all but impossible to procure easily in the north without special permits. To get even a 2.6 gal. (10 L) ration, cars in Tohoku often have to wait for half a day. When TIME wanted to accompany an NGO helicopter delivering aid to one stricken area, we were given permission on one condition: that TIME hire a car to drive the aid supplies to the airfield. The NGO's cars were out of gas and had no way to get the relief goods to the chopper. Such shortages have been repeated writ large, hampering even the efforts of major organizations like the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which was one of the first groups on the scene.

There have been some extenuating circumstances. The radiation leaking from the Fukushima plant has meant that aid vehicles have to take a wide berth around a region contaminated by higher-than-normal radiation levels. Nevertheless, there are other ways to Tohoku. Indeed, one of the first organizations to start relief convoys in the northeast was none other than the yakuza, Japan's famous gangsters. Unconstrained by reams of regulations, the underworld representatives, whose business tentacles extend to the trucking business, simply started delivering aid on their own, without government approval.

Citizen volunteers have been actively discouraged by the government from jumping into their cars and delivering aid themselves. That's because after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, roads into the area were jam-packed with well-meaning citizens whose endeavors hindered larger aid efforts. But there's a fine balance to be struck between not overwhelming damaged infrastructure and leaving it worryingly underutilized. And while U.S. military aid sorties conducted from American bases in Japan have been accepted by the Japanese government, other international organizations have been quietly told they're not needed — a stunning response given the magnitude of the disaster. "Everything has to go through government emergency centers," says one international NGO representative in Tokyo. "But they're very slow to respond and can't keep up with the flow of aid. They should let us get in there and start getting relief to people instead of worrying about paperwork."

Meanwhile, back at Saitama Super Arena, Kouhei Nagatsuka, 18, ponders the strange fact that he just graduated from high school without a proper ceremony in Futaba, the town next to where the Fukushima plant is located. On March 11, the earthquake destroyed his home — or so he has heard from a friend who went back to the ravaged town to take a look. Nagatsuka and his family were first herded into an emergency shelter for earthquake and tsunami victims. Then, just as they were contemplating trying to salvage what they could from their home, a Fukushima reactor began spewing radioactive material into the air. Four days ago, they arrived as nuclear-plant refugees to Saitama.

As Nagatsuka scrounged for warm clothes for his four siblings in a heap of donated goods, news that steam and smoke were again pouring from two of the plant's damaged reactors spread among the displaced Futaba residents. (By Tuesday evening, plant engineers said they had laid power cables to all six of the facility's nuclear reactors, though it's not clear whether the electricity can be turned on or whether pumps needed to cool down overheating reactors will work.) Already, reports of vegetables, water and milk tainted by small levels of radiation from the leaking nuclear plant have raised concerns about the accident's long-term effects — even if engineers are able to tame the reactors in the coming days and weeks. "I'm afraid I'll never be able to go back there," says Nagatsuka, who spent time volunteering when he was in high school. "I was supposed to start my adult life, but I guess I'll have to do that someplace else."

• Hannah Beech / Tokyo