DEVASTATING JOLT IN JAPAN : Some Look to Future, While Others Seek Way Out : Survivors: Roads and shelters in Kobe are jammed. But phones are working again, and food supplies are available.

As taxi driver Narutoshi Kuwayama entered downtown Kobe on Thursday evening, he pointed out house after house, speculating on the fate of their inhabitants.

“Look at these houses,” he said, pointing to a pile of rubble and a collapsed two-story home. “There are probably dead people in there.

“This is the second floor. It’s completely crushed the first floor. If there were people there, they’re dead.”

In a single 10-mile stretch of highway between Osaka and downtown Kobe, several hundred homes have collapsed--tile-roofed, single-family houses that have tumbled into piles of sticks and two-story apartments in which the first floor has been crushed.

Very few show any sign of rescue work, and Kuwayama said he fears that few who died in these homes have been included in official death counts. “It’s not just 4,000 or 5,000,” he said, fretting that the death toll may yet climb by many thousands.

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Survivors are gathered at such places as the Nishinada Elementary School, where 3,000 people are jammed into an unheated gymnasium and classrooms warmed only by the people in them. Meals are taken in the school’s gravel parking lot.

The school faces the main functioning highway into Kobe, which has been clogged with traffic from dawn to late at night since Tuesday.

Thursday evening, thousands of people made the two- or three-hour walk to Nishinomiya railway station, the closest functioning public transportation. Many could get out by car or on foot but have chosen to stay.

“The most important reason we’re staying here is that rebuilding our home will cost money, and a hotel is expensive,” said Kazuhisa Yamashita, 25, as he sat in the school parking lot around a fire made of wood from destroyed houses. “Our house is leaning against the house next door. We’re going to have to tear it down and rebuild it.”

Yamashita guessed that, in the neighborhood from which people have gathered at this school, several hundred houses have been damaged beyond repair. He feared that many of his neighbors had died, but he had enough hope to add: “Even if the house has collapsed, sometimes furniture holds up a space, and people could survive,” he said. “Just because a house is destroyed doesn’t mean the people are necessarily dead.”

Yamashita’s 53-year-old father, Yoshiyuki Yamashita, joined neighbors in saving three people from just such a house.

“There was some space,” Yoshiyuki Yamashita said. “We broke into that area and pulled out three people. They were not hurt seriously. They could walk away.”

Those gathered around the parking-lot fire said they believed that, if more help had come more quickly to Kobe, many who died could have been saved.

Many of the drivers on the crammed road in front of the school shelter had gone to Osaka and returned with food, water and kerosene for heaters. Others had come to see whether relatives were OK, and some were simply trying to get past Kobe to points west.

“In my heart, I feel people should avoid driving,” Kazuhisa Yamashita said. “But people are concerned about their friends and relatives, and I understand that too.”

Many, possibly most, people stayed in their neighborhoods, at least initially.

“We always think the police and Self Defense Force will help us,” explained Kuwayama. “If we’re hungry, we expect food or water from the national or local government. Instead of moving foolishly, we think we should wait for help. That’s what everyone thought. But after two or three days, people are beginning to walk out. Many more are walking out today than yesterday.

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“People are disappointed in the government,” Kuwayama continued. “My own feeling is that, after the San Francisco earthquake, experts and government officials said it was because things were not built properly, and it would not happen in Japan. We believed them. So we are terribly disappointed. We thought modern condominiums would not collapse, but they did.

“But there is no problem with law and order. These convenience markets, the bank automated teller machines--no one has touched them. I’m impressed with that.”

Kazuhisa Yamashita said he planned to drive his younger brother today to a relative’s home closer to Osaka, so he could prepare for a college test Saturday. Afterward he will come back to Kobe, he said.

Many people staying at the school have access to food from their homes. Government-supplied rice balls arrived Wednesday morning--one per person--and bread and water have been delivered since Wednesday afternoon. Some blankets came Wednesday, and more Thursday.

Although water service was still out in this area, electricity and phones were restored Thursday evening.

One woman stepped away from a phone in front of the school late Thursday evening and walked, sobbing, down the street.

“My mother said that this is what it was like during the great bombing of Kobe during World War II,” Kuwayama noted.