Japan Helps Restore Flood-Hit Court Papers in Sri Lanka

New Delhi, June 1 (Jiji Press)--Japanese experts have been helping Sri Lanka restore a huge amount of flood-soaked court documents.

Late last November, Cyclone Ditwah hit the island nation in the Indian Ocean, affecting more than 2.2 million people and leaving some 820 of them dead or missing.

According to the Japanese Embassy in Colombo, more than 170,000 documents at a court in the central Sri Lanka city of Kandy, including papers on pending cases, were soaked in floodwater.

In a quick response to the Sri Lankan government's request for document restoration cooperation, Tokyo in March dispatched specialists including Yosei Kozuma, chief of the Cultural Heritage Disaster Risk Management Center in Nara, and Masakazu Furuta, professor emeritus at Osaka Metropolitan University.

Kozuma has played a key part in restoring March 2011 tsunami-soaked paper cultural properties in northeastern Japan, and Furuta has been a leading researcher in radiation sterilization.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]