TOKYO (Reuters) – Hatsune Miku has a following that would make most Japanese pop stars green with envy, with thousands of fans at every concert and a big international following.

She never misses a beat, fluffs a line or messes up a step. But then she doesn’t really exist.

Hatsune Miku is computer generated, based on a voice-synthesizing programme developed by the company Crypton Future Media that allows users to create their own music.

Her image was produced by the company, but her music is a creation of her fans, Her best songs — the ones headlined at her concerts — have emerged from more than 20 different people.

The fans know what the fans like.

All 10,000 tickets for the digital diva’s four shows in Tokyo — two on Thursday and two on Friday — sold out in hours despite the 6,300 yen ($76) ticket price.

Hatsune Miku was projected onto the stage at the shows while thousands of other fans packed into 24 cinemas to watch live.

TOKYO (Reuters) – When the tsunami roared through his northern Japanese hometown of Ofunato last March, sushi chef Sanichi Niinuma managed to escape with his life, but his shop was battered and badly damaged by the raging waters.

In the aftermath of the disaster, which killed over 400 in the city, the 47-year-old Niinuma went as far as starting to rebuild his shop — only to be told by the city that the area was off limits since the land had sunk and power and sewage systems were destroyed.

After several months of part-time work, he accepted an offer to take over a sushi shop in Tokyo, becoming one of thousands of people forced out of their hometowns across northern Japan by the disaster in order to make a living.

Most, like Niinuma, have no idea if they will ever go home.

“There was definitely the feeling that I had lost a place to go back to, so there was a moment where I thought I might just stay in Tokyo,” Niinuma said amidst the gleaming wood of his shop in western Tokyo, some 350 km (217 miles) south of Ofunato.

“I’ll be 60 in not so long and so I’d like to return in about five years, but one has to think about whether it’s possible to go back or not, whether the disaster areas will be ready to eat this kind of sushi again.”

His home untouched, Niinuma was luckier than many. But with years left on the mortgage, few jobs in the area and his shop scheduled for demolition to make way for city development projects, he was left with little choice but to leave.

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan (Reuters) – Very little was left standing in the Japanese city of Rikuzentakata after a huge tsunami tore through nearly a year ago. Even the centuries-old pine forest by the sea that had long been a symbol of the city was obliterated.

But amidst the destruction that killed about one in 12 of the city’s residents, one lonely pine tree out of more than 60,000 has clung to life along the ravaged coast. It came to embody residents’ hopes for renewal.

“We didn’t have any hope at the time. So even having one survive really was like having a beam of light shining through the darkness,” said 47-year-old Seiko Handa.

But now the 250-year-old pine tree is dying, a victim of the salt water left in the ground by the tsunami.

“Even toward the beginning we in charge of the tree were worried that it would indeed die off,” said Kazunari Takahashi, an official at the city’s Forest, Fisheries and Agricultural Department.

Originally planted as a windbreak to keep salt and sand from blowing in from the sea and wreaking havoc in the fields, the rows of pines known as Takata-Matsubara stretched along two km (a mile) of beach and were one of the most famous sites of northern Japan.

But the nearly 10-metre (33 ft) wall of water that roared in after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck offshore on March 11 last year obliterated even the land where the forest had stood, along with more than 3,000 buildings in the city.

OFUNATO, Japan (Reuters) – In a large, bright room not far from the ocean that raged through this coastal Japanese city nearly a year ago, a handful of people with magnifying glasses pore over boxes of photographs of friends or loved ones.

The massive March 11 tsunami that leveled buildings and flattened towns along a wide swathe of northern Japan, including Ofunato, also took a more subtle toll, with hundreds of thousands of photographs lost to the churning waters.

But now these memories are slowly making their way back to their owners, thanks to the painstaking efforts of a team that cleans them of mud, dirt and oil.

“I got one photo blown up, and I was so thankful for that. I put it in a frame, and it brought tears to my eyes,” said 77-year-old resident Yoshiko Jindai, looking through boxes of photographs.

Ofunato has enlisted a team of seven part-time staffers to help sort though the over 350,000 photos that have accumulated after being brought in by police, firefighters, rescue workers and average citizens who were looking through the rubble.

In charge of cleaning and restoring the photos is paper conservator Satoko Kinno, who said her job is the second stage in the marathon of returning the photos to their owners after they are found.

“I try to remember that people found these photos in the midst of rubble, and that I have to take the baton from them. So that’s where I get my motivation,” Kinno said.

OKUMA, Japan (Reuters) – Back home for just three hours, a tearful Miyoko Takeda sorted through her belongings. She left behind the kimonos she once wore as a traditional dancer, fearful they might be contaminated by radiation.

Nearly a year has passed since a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit Japan, Okuma town, but the site of the reactors at the centre of the Fukushima nuclear crisis remains off limits for residents, save for short trips to hastily abandoned homes.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant, on the coast 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, was wrecked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering reactor meltdowns and radiation leaks that caused mass evacuations and widespread contamination.

For the about 11,000 residents of Okuma, and the nearly 80,000 people across the prefecture who have been unable to return to their homes due to high radiation, the mental scars run deep even though many of their homes are physically intact.

Many do not know when, if ever, they can return to land that has been in their families for generations.

The 74-year-old Takeda, who visited her home with her husband at the weekend to remove cabinets, said that she has been unable to properly function ever since the evacuation last March.

“I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I lost 8 kilogrammes and when I went to the doctor I threw up everything I took,” she said, walking through her house, less than 10 km from the plant, in a white protective suit.

TOKYO, Oct 28 (Reuters) – Japan’s two newest stars have all the basics of being a pop idol down. Their dance moves are sharp, they sing without missing a beat, and their songs have made the top 10.

The only thing is, neither one of them exists.

The green-haired “Megpoid” and red-haired “Akikoloid” are both completely computer generated, the latest in a line of popular digital characters based on a voice-synthesizing programme that allows users to create their own music.

They were the stars of a concert during the recent Digital Concept Expo in Tokyo.

Music made by “Vocaloid,” the voice-synthesizing programme, and its spin-off characters, has made it into the top 10 on Japan’s weekly top hits list. But for those watching the concert, the performance was nothing more than thin air – unless they looked at the screen showing the augmented reality (AR) scene with the 3D characters inserted into live video.

The software used at the concert used a complicated system of sensors and motion capture technology to create the two singers, with sensors around the venue and on the cameras and the hands of two human back dancers interacting to make a composite that was inserted into the concert in real time.

Nothing about the singers is real. Even their high, perky voices are digitally generated, but sound no different from those of many a live Japanese pop singer.

TOKYO (Reuters) – For some elderly survivors of Japan’s March earthquake and tsunami, comfort comes in the form of a small white robotic seal named Paro.

Sitting only 27 km (17 miles) south of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant on a hill above an area ravaged by the tsunami, the Suisyoen retirement home is located in the middle of Japan’s triple crises.

While the retirement home structure was spared major damage by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, fears of radiation contamination from the nearby nuclear plant led officials to evacuate Suisyoen for two months until Mid-may.

A week after they returned, the robotics division of Japanese company Daiwa House offered to lend Suisyoen two of its seal robots coated with anti-bacterial fur, now nicknamed Love and Peace for two years.

The robots normally cost around 12,000 yen ($155) a month to lease.

The furry friends are now treated as pets by the residents, with many of them still dealing with memories of the quake. Some residents hold onto the seals for longer than others.

“If I hold onto this, it doesn’t matter if there’s a typhoon outside, I still feel safe,” said 85-year-old Satsuko Yatsuzaka after she had been hugging one of the seals for about half an hour.

YAMADA, Japan (Reuters) – On sprawling blue plastic tarps in a small public hall lie a mass of mud-covered photographs that may be the only remaining printed memories for tsunami victims in the fishing town of Yamada.

Photographs have become one of the most precious commodities in the recovery effort in the tsunami that slammed Japan’s northeast coast nearly two weeks ago, obliterating towns and leaving about 26,000 dead or missing.

Fire-fighters digging through vast plains of debris searching for corpses pull photographs and other important papers out of the piles of destruction delicately, placing them in covered bins to protect them from any more damage.

The photos then make their way to place such as the town offices of Yamada, where about 400 of the town’s population of 20,000 were killed, hundreds went missing and 3,618 became evacuees.

Mami Hebiishi lives in an evacuation center set up at a local elementary school with her family after the tsunami destroyed her home, taking all the family’s belongings except the clothes they were wearing.

Hebiishi found a photo album of her daughter with pictures from a special ceremony in Japan to celebrate reaching the age of three.

She clutched the mud-stained album tightly, covering a picture on the front of her daughter Natsuki dressed in a kimono.

SENDAI, Japan (Reuters) – - Heavy snow blanketed Japan’s devastated northeast on Wednesday, hindering rescue workers and adding to the woes of the few, mainly elderly, residents who remained in the area worst hit by last week’s massive earthquake and tsunami.

In some parts of Sendai city, firefighters and relief teams sifted through mounds of rubble, hoping to find any sign of life in water-logged wastelands where homes and factories once stood.

But, as they did in most other towns, rescuers just pulled out body after body, which they wrapped in brightly colored blankets and lined up neatly against the grey, grim landscape.

“The strong smell of bodies and the dirty seawater make search extremely difficult,” said Yin Guanghui, a member of a Chinese rescue team working in the battered town of Ofunato.

“Powerful waves in the tsunami would repeatedly hit houses in the area. Anyone trapped under the debris would be drown in no time, without any chance to survive.”

Japanese media said at least two people were pulled alive from the rubble, more than 72 hours after the earthquake and tsunami struck. But rescue officials said the snow weakened what little chance they had of finding any more survivors.

“Snow has just come down in a blanket. Visibility is just 40 meters,” said Patrick Fuller of the International Red Cross Federation from what remained of Otsuchi, a fishing hamlet.

SENDAI, Japan (Reuters) – - Heavy snow blanketed Japan’s devastated northeast on Wednesday, hindering rescue workers and adding to the woes of the few, mainly elderly, residents who remained in the area worst hit by last week’s massive earthquake and tsunami.

In Sendai, once a city but now a water-logged wasteland, firefighters and relief teams sifted through mounds of rubble, hoping to find any sign of life.

But, like in most other towns, rescuers just pulled out body after body, which they wrapped in brightly colored blankets and lined up neatly against the grey, grim landscape.

“The strong smell of bodies and the dirty seawater make search extremely difficult,” said Yin Guanghui, a member of a Chinese rescue team working in the battered town of Ofunato.

“Powerful waves in the tsunami would repeatedly hit houses in the area. Anyone trapped under the debris would be drown in no time, without any chance to survive.”

Japanese media said at least two people were pulled alive from the rubble, more than 72 hours after the earthquake and tsunami struck. But rescue officials said the snow weakened what little chance they had of finding any more survivors.

“Snow has just come down in a blanket. Visibility is just 40 meters,” said Patrick Fuller of the International Red Cross Federation from what remained of Otsuchi, a fishing hamlet.