Japan says it was unprepared for disaster

TOKYO -- Sirens wailed Friday along a devastated coastline to mark exactly one week since an earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear emergency, and the government acknowledged it was slow to respond to the disasters that the prime minister called a "great test for the Japanese people."

The admission came as Japan welcomed U.S. help in stabilizing its overheated, radiation-leaking nuclear complex and raised the accident level for the crisis, putting it on a par with the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania. Nuclear experts have been saying for days that Japan was underplaying the severity of the problems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant on the northeast coast.

Meanwhile the U.S. State Department is expanding the area for voluntary evacuations for family members of U.S. personnel in Japan. The department issued a travel warning late Wednesday advising Americans to avoid travel to Japan and authorizing evacuations for family members of its personnel out of Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.

The department issued an updated warning Friday night that expanded the evacuation area to 13 other prefectures. The warning gave no details on why the evacuation area was expanded.

Saturday, military search teams pulled a young man from a crushed house, eight days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The young man, found in the rubble in Kesennuma city, was too weak to talk and was immediately transferred to a nearby hospital, a military official said.

Kyodo News agency said the man was in his 20s.

The National Police Agency raised the death toll Saturday to 7,197 people. Another 10,905 were reported missing.

The tsunami knocked out power to cooling systems at the nuclear plant. Since then, four of Fukushima's six reactor units have seen fires, explosions or partial meltdowns.

Military fire trucks sprayed the reactor units Friday for a second day in desperate attempts to prevent the fuel from overheating and emitting dangerous levels of radiation.

Meanwhile, driven by winds over the Pacific Ocean, the radioactive plume released last week reached Southern California on Friday. However, International Atomic Energy Agency officials and independent experts believe the radiation would dissipate so strongly by the time it reached the U.S. coastline that it would pose no health risk.