Japanese officials said that more than 15,000 people were either killed or left missing by the devastating earthquake and tsunami which ravaged the country's northeast last week.

Another 387,000 Japanese residents had been forced from their homes and were in temporary accommodation - the quality of which varied greatly. According to the most recent figures, released by Japan's national police agency, at least 15 people have died in refugee camps, The Associated Press reports.

A massive 9.0 magnitude quake struck Japan's east coast last Friday, sending a towering wall of water, 40 feet high in some areas, tearing into the country with devastating force.

As search and rescue crews from Japan and around the world struggle to deal with the scope of the physical disaster in the hard-hit Miyagi prefecture, the threat of a nuclear meltdown looms large at a power plant in nearby Fukushima.

Japan's military was using heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to dump tons of seawater onto reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant to try and prevent spent nuclear fuel and the active reactors themselves from reaching a critical level of overheating. The plant's normal cooling system, and the backup systems, failed after the tsunami slammed into the plant almost a week ago.