A GOLD Coast couple living in Japan are hoping to help supply houses to the country's homeless.

Former Tweed Daily News journalist Deirdre Smith and her partner Ross McCain have been trying to help the tens of thousands of people stranded after a nine-magnitude earthquake and 10m tsunami devastated Japan more than a month ago.

“A Japanese man we do business with has got a factory here and he wanted to start making emergency houses for the homeless,” Ms Smith said.

“We went up north with him to areas that were affected by the tsunami.”

Ms Smith said the 24-hour round trip was an opportunity to meet people and officials in the hopes of arranging the supply of the emergency houses.

“It's so hard to tell if we were successful because things just work so slowly.

“Over 100,000 people are homeless so the nuclear issue doesn't seem to concern anyone here.

“We're more worried about the people still affected and that nothing seems to be happening.”

The couple, who run a bed-and-breakfast in the Hakuba Valley, offered free accommodation to homeless people living in stadiums to no avail.

“They just won't move and we can't understand why,” Ms Smith said.

“We think it's because they want to stay with their community and they're worried about being forgotten.

“The government in one of the areas is saying ‘we'll have everything back to normal in 2020'.”

During their 1200km trip Ms Smith said the worst damage they saw was at Sendai Airport.

“It went on for kilometre after kilometre.

“What was most amazing was the cars, it was like a kid had a bin full of toys cars and had upended it everywhere.

“Tens of thousands of totalled cars just everywhere.”