Here is the latest casualty total from the disaster in Japan:

The death toll in Japan’s earthquake and tsunami will likely exceed 10,000 in one state alone, an official said Sunday, as millions of survivors were left without drinking water, electricity and proper food along the pulverized northeastern coast.

“This is Japan’s most severe crisis since the war ended 65 years ago,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan told reporters, adding that Japan’s future would be decided by the response to this crisis.

Although the government doubled the number of soldiers deployed in the aid effort to 100,000, it seemed overwhelmed by what’s turning out to be a triple disaster: Friday’s quake and tsunami damaged two nuclear reactors at a power plant on the coast, and at least one of them appeared to be going through a partial meltdown, raising fears of a radiation leak.

The police chief of Miyagi prefecture, or state, told a gathering of disaster relief officials that his estimate for deaths was more than 10,000, police spokesman Go Sugawara told The Associated Press. Miyagi has a population of 2.3 million and is one of the three prefectures hardest hit in Friday’s disaster. Only 379 people have officially been confirmed dead in Miyagi.

The nuclear crisis posed fresh concerns for those who survived the earthquake and tsunami, which hit with breathtaking force and speed, breaking or sweeping away everything in its path.

“First I was worried about the quake, now I’m worried about radiation. I live near the plants, so I came here to find out if I’m OK. I tested negative, but I don’t know what to do next,” Kenji Koshiba, a construction worker, said at an emergency center in Koriyama town near the power plant in Fukushima.

According to officials, more than 1,400 people were killed — including 200 people whose bodies were found Sunday along the coast — and more than 1,000 were missing in the disasters. Another 1,700 were injured.  [Associated Press]

If the death toll climbs as high as 10,000 this disaster would easily surpass the 6,400 death toll from the Kobe Earthquake back in 1995.  Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad.  The damage unfortunately appears to already easily have passed the damage from that earthquake mostly because of the tsunami.