Car makers Honda and Toyota today said they have delayed plans to restart assembly in Japan because of a shortage of necessary parts, with supply chains hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami.
Toyota said it had delayed plans to restart car production until after March 26. The car maker lacks parts such as electronics devices and rubber and resin products. The halt to auto assembly will affect 140,000 units, a spokesman said.
Toyota started producing replacement parts for the domestic market on Thursday and parts for overseas production yesterday, but has idled vehicle assembly operations since the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
The disruption to supply chains had previously led Honda to suspend production until tomorrow but it has now extended the suspension of finished car and motorcycles at three plants to March 27.
Around 22,000 people are confirmed dead or listed as missing in Japan following the country's biggest ever quake and the devastating tsunami it unleashed, which ravaged swathes of the northeastern coast.
The disasters have plunged Japan into what Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called its worst crisis since World War II, exacerbated by a nuclear emergency at the stricken Fukushima plant.
Infrastructure along the northeast coast has been shattered while leading companies have shuttered plants amid rolling power outages, hitting output.
Exports of key components and crucial equipment used in the assembly of goods abroad, such as silicon wafers, liquid-crystal displays and electric machinery, have also been hit sending shockwaves across global markets.
$500,000 'missing' from tsunami-hit Japan bank
A bank in a tsunami-ravaged area of northeast Japan has discovered about $500,000 is missing from its vault, local media reported today.
The electric lock was apparently damaged by the huge wave unleashed by the March 11 earthquake, but employees had not noticed before closing up on Friday for a three-day holiday weekend.
'We didn't realise the lock was broken,' a worker at the Shinkin Bank in the city of Kesennuma told a local news agency.
Japan has seen few incidents of looting and theft after the twin disaster, drawing admiration overseas for restraint in the face of appalling adversity.
