Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario left Friday for Japan to personally look after the welfare of the Filipinos affected by last Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said.
The department said Del Rosario met with embassy officials to assess the situation on the ground and make the contingency plan for the Filipinos.
Eduardo Malaya, spokesman for DFA, said Del Rosario went to Japan to determine the need to raise the alert level for Filipinos who were directly affected by the catastrophe. The dangerous levels of
radiation unleashed by a damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima is another cause for concern, he said.
There are 4,600 Filipinos in the quake-hit prefectures of Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate and Ibaraki, but not all have been accounted for by the
embassy a week after the disaster.
Del Rosario will later proceed to Bahrain and Yemen to check the condition of some 30,000 Filipinos amid the rising tension in the Middle East.