One year after the biggest earthquake on record to rock Japan, the country is back on its feet and open for business.

That is the message from a government anxious to limit the physical and psychological scars left by the apocalyptic scenes of last March.

The 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami devastated Japan’s north-eastern coast, killing thousands of people and triggering a crisis at a nuclear power plant.

Whole towns were swept away, hundreds of thousands of residents made homeless, and ports, oil refineries, steel plants and factories knocked out of action.

But the recovery is “right on track” and “a lot of progress has been made”, according to Minister Hiroshi Suzuki.

Mr Suzuki, director of the Japan Information and Cultural Centre at the Japanese Embassy in London, spoke of how the region’s infrastructure was gradually being pieced back together. “Roads, railways and ports, lifelines like electricity, have made a steady recovery”, he said.

The reconstruction effort was, in turn, helping the economy bounce back, he added.

Following the disaster, Japan’s government estimated the cost of rebuilding over the next decade at €227 billion, of which €191 billion is earmarked for spending in the first five years: a designated “intensive recovery period”.

The money is being raised through taxes – four supplementary budgets were held last year – but the country is also keen for foreign input.

“We’re encouraging investment from overseas,” Mr Suzuki said. “To attract from the international community more investment, more trade is essential. But there remains a long way to go in patching up the country and healing its wounds.

Over the past year the focus has been on addressing the starkest effects of the catastrophe, with the provision of shelter for evacuees taking precedence.

Around 470,000 people were left homeless in the immediate aftermath, a figure that has since come down to 344,000, the minister said.

Of those remaining displaced, fewer than 700 still live in emergency shelters with the rest now in temporary houses or rented accommodation funded by the municipal government.

Removal of the debris created by the disaster has also been one of the first priorities, and the task is said to be about 96 per cent complete.

With hundreds of kilometres of land in the northeast of the country hit, this was always going to take some time.

“It was a devastating tsunami that literally swept away so many towns and villages, so coping with debris was a massive task. But there has been great progress in that area,” Mr Suzuki said.

“I’m happy to say that the debris scattered around residential areas was completely removed by the end of August but obviously there’s much more that needs to be done.

“There’s debris in other parts of the affected area that still needs to be removed.”

Around Fukushima, where the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex leaked radiation, a 20km radius evacuation zone remains in place.