COLUMN ONE : Aftershock for Psyche of Japanese : Quake reveals traits that help and hurt recovery. Cooperation, endurance are hailed. But critics see passivity, pride and rigidity.

Harumi Takasago, his unshaven face weary from just six hours of sleep in six days, manages a microcosm of Japanese society as the de facto commander of a relief shelter at Uozaki Elementary School in this quake-ravaged city.

He has seen people die in the rubble as residents desperately tried to claw them out by hand, while Japan’s infamous bureaucracy kept Self-Defense Forces troops from reaching the scene for four days.

He has watched refugees in shelters while away the day, waiting helplessly atop futons, reflecting what he calls a national passivity instilled by centuries of obedience to authority.

He and fellow evacuees have starved on one banana a day and shivered on unheated wooden floors, while Japanese officials balked at accepting foreign aid--including an American offer to dock the aircraft carrier Independence in Kobe Bay to provide 2,000 beds and medical care. Critics say Tokyo’s posture exemplified everything from a sense of shame about showing foreign guests an unkempt home to an arrogance that Japan could make it on its own.

But Takasago, 46, and others here have also seen food shared among strangers, and after the first chaotic days, the beginnings of an efficient relief operation as the leadership gap was solved and tasks were decided upon and delegated. They have managed to maintain a remarkable order and discipline that keeps crammed rooms tidy, still-unflushable toilets clean and most people outwardly calm despite mounting stress.

“In a crisis like this, the national character comes out in an extreme way,” Takasago said.

As Japan struggles to pick up the pieces of a shattered city in its worst earthquake disaster in more than 70 years, the response of its officials and workers, victims and volunteers mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of Japanese society itself. The disaster has illuminated the national psyche--a complex emotional tapestry of shame and pride, of dependence and fatalism, of the celebrated ability to “endure the unendurable,” as then-Emperor Hirohito urged his nation as he declared surrender in war.

Diligence, efficiency and cooperation are evident in the daily snapshots from this devastated land: A convoy of heavy machinery quickly moved in to blast apart the cracked, toppled Hanshin highway. Supplies of steaming teriyaki beef soon replaced cold rice balls.

Despite a slow start, the Hyogo prefectural office now bustles with Self-Defense Forces personnel, engineers, planners and others scurrying to resolve a mind-boggling number of problems. Yusuke Nagano, deputy section chief of the prefecture’s fire and traffic security division, said the city faces a shortage of doctors, ruined railways and roads, a pressing need to find homes for 300,000 refugees, mounting garbage, decaying corpses.

But overall, the recovery effort is progressing well--with water, phone lines and electricity substantially restored, he said.

“In general, the Japanese people are well disciplined,” Nagano said. “We follow orders. That led Japan into the wrong direction during the war, when the people docilely followed. But where teamwork is necessary, you don’t have individuals refusing to go along.”

Yet critics have also faulted what they call weak leadership, slow decision-making and bureaucratic rigidity. Officials placed a priority on saving face over saving lives, some say.

The quake response invited comparisons with Japan’s policy paralysis over the Persian Gulf War, when the nation was also criticized for an inability to manage a crisis swiftly and efficiently. In the current disaster, the biggest controversies surround the government’s delay in dispatching Self-Defense Forces rescue teams and the late and limited acceptance of offers of foreign aid pouring in from more than 30 nations.

The night of the quake, Takashi Ukai, a doctor trained in disaster relief, was trying to get a Self-Defense Forces helicopter to ferry critically injured earthquake victims from the disabled Kobe hospitals into Osaka.

But the military office told him he couldn’t contact the Self-Defense Forces directly and laid out a cumbersome five-step process he needed to follow. The path would have taken him from the local fire department to the health department to the Hyogo governor’s secretary to the governor to the Self-Defense Forces. Ukai figures he lost more than 10 hours trying to unravel the red tape; he wonders how many lives were lost by the delay.

“No one is willing to take responsibility for the whole situation,” he fumed. “In this country, government officials are very strong and won’t easily listen to the experts. To make matters worse, bureaucrats are transferred every two years so no one is truly responsible for this kind of disaster work. This is a weak point of this country.”

Takasugo also criticized an unwillingness to take responsibility in his own relief shelter. Minutes after the quake struck, he hurried to open up the Uozaki school as a shelter. For the next 36 hours, he commanded the place virtually alone without any offers of help. And when a nearby gas leak forced the 1,500 evacuees to flee to another shelter the next day, they pushed their way out in a panic, leaving him alone with 80 elderly people unable to walk.

Weak leadership was also evident in the much-vaunted Japanese neighborhood associations, which act as liaisons with government agencies. The associations are typically headed not by the most capable local resident but rather the wealthiest and most prominent. These chairmen--and they are almost always men--are not always prepared for the job.

In one Kobe neighborhood, where 30 of 150 residents died, the only home left standing after the quake belonged to the chairman of the local neighborhood group. Yet neighbors complain that the chairman was the first to flee.

“He didn’t do his job,” said Kenji Tsukahara, 25, who recently returned from a seven-year stint in Los Angeles to stay with his parents. Lacking proper direction, Tsukahara said, residents just dragged the bodies of the dead out of their homes and left them on the curbside.

Yoshiaki Saito, 45, was irate about Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s conduct and contrasted it with what he believed would be the reaction of other Asian leaders. “In (South) Korea, President Kim Young Sam would have been on television right away telling the people what would be done. Murayama flies down in a helicopter and quickly flies back,” Saito said, as he huddled with his family of five on blankets at a relief center here.

The government’s slow response to international aid offers has also come under fire, drawing attacks on everything from bureaucratic rigidity to an “island mentality” blamed for hampering cooperation with foreigners.

As people lay dying in the debris, health officials held up a Swiss team of rescue dogs for a day as they debated whether to keep the animals in quarantine, as required. They initially barred most foreign medicine and equipment from entering Japan with international medical teams, causing some doctors here to reduce needed dosages of antibiotics for fear of later shortages, said one Kobe infirmary physician.

“The Americans said they could have gotten an unlimited amount of medicine, but were told they couldn’t by the Japanese side,” one physician said.

Japanese donors were also discouraged by bureaucratic runarounds.

Even in times of disaster, bureaucrats seldom cooperate except at the highest levels. At Kobe City Hall, a young businessman approached a bureaucrat responsible for caring for the homeless. With bowed head, the businessman said he wanted to set up portable toilets, made by his company, throughout the city. He was brushed off. “We don’t handle that here. It involves all kinds of waste,” the bureaucrat said. “Go to the Environment Agency.” The businessman left tired and defeated.

The government in Tokyo accepted only three items--blankets, tents and water--from a list of relief support offered by the U.S. military. In the list, obtained by The Times, the U.S. military in Japan said it could provide an array of aid from its Pacific operations: aircraft; generators; earthmovers; road and rubble clearing; mass casualty care, including medical equipment; water production and storage; jaws of life; rescue dogs. Ships, configured for humanitarian aid and used to help typhoon victims in Guam and elsewhere, were also offered.

But a Self-Defense Forces spokesman at the command center in Kobe said Japan had the equipment and services offered by the Americans. “The question is whether the prefecture wants to receive the aid or not,” he said.

The issue is a sore point. The Self-Defense Forces immediately responded to the quake with a 100-man unit dispatched to the collapsed Itami railroad station. But the troops had to hold back larger operations until the prefectural governor officially requested their aid.

That request came more than four hours after the 5:46 a.m. quake, leading to a delay in the sending of the first 1,000-member team until 3 p.m.--a snafu that has provoked angry exchanges.

Atsuyuki Sassa, former chief of the Cabinet’s security control room and a crisis-management expert, said political factors--the pacifism of Japan’s Socialist prime minister, chief Cabinet secretary and former Socialist Chairwoman Takako Doi, the disaster area’s most prominent politician--hobbled military rescue efforts. “The Cabinet hesitated to invite the Self-Defense Forces because the uniforms give a military atmosphere,” Sassa said. “But they should improve their attitudes because those uniformed people know the (rescue) sites better than the civilians.”

Others cite more complex societal attitudes to explain Japan’s response.

Ukai, the doctor, said the national reluctance to accept international aid reflected the proverb: “Even samurai who don’t eat hold a toothpick in their mouths”--meaning that hungry warriors mask their needs by pretending they’ve just eaten. “It’s a matter of saving face,” Ukai said. “To show your needs is a weakness or a kind of shame.”

One Japanese media critic gave a harsher assessment. “This reflects Japanese arrogance: ‘We are No. 1 economically and scientifically advanced and we can take care of our own. . . .’ ” Another analyst added: “Japan is an economic superpower, a country that gives handouts and overseas aid to developed countries. Suddenly, countries like (South) Korea, Thailand and Taiwan are offering to send rice and blankets. It is a shocking reversal of perceived self-image.”

Kazufumi Manabe, a sociology professor at Kansei Gakuin University in the quake-stricken area of Nishinomiya, likened the hesitancy to invite outside experts to Japan at a time of national disarray to the reluctance to open messy homes to guests.

But many victims were outraged over what they perceived as the greater concern with national pride than their lives.

“English, Americans--anyone would have been fine. The government should have allowed anyone to come and help save lives,” said Hirokazu Matsushita, an evacuee at the Uozaki shelter in Kobe.

Scratching away rubble and lifting debris with bare hands, he and his neighbors freed five people--three of whom survived--on the disaster day.

Analysts say that another trait evident in the Japanese quake response was the reluctance to impose on others--in part because doing so obligates the recipient to the giver in an endless chain of giving and receiving.

Many of the 300,000 people crowded into Kobe’s relief centers have friends or relatives they can stay with. But in contrast to what usually happens in America after a disaster, in Japan, where homes are small and people are reluctant to impose on others, scores of people have declined to go live with relatives, even temporarily.

Retiree Kazuo Yokoyama has four children living in Nagoya, just hours away. But he chooses to stay in the crowded auditorium of a junior high school here. “Our son asks us to stay with him, but we’re fine here, we all get along,” Yokoyama said. His wife added: “When there is really nowhere left to go, then maybe we will go. We’ll just be in the way.”

The numbers still clinging to shelters also reflect a Japanese tendency toward passivity and dependence on authorities, some analysts say. Such attitudes have developed because of this society’s strong top-down nature and a group ethic that discourages self-initiative and self-assertiveness.

But the temblor also has challenged cultural stereotypes. Although the disaster area has remained relatively free of crime, reports of looting are growing. Fifty shop owners in the upscale Sannomiya shopping area have formed a vigilante corps to protect their damaged stores after $100,000 in goods were stolen. Police also report that bikes, cars and jewelry have been stolen from damaged homes.

And the stereotype that Japanese tend not to volunteer--confining acts of charity to those in their exclusive circles--has been shattered by an outpouring of donations and philanthropic activity.

Corporations such as Sanyo Electric have given workers paid leaves to help. Donation boxes have popped up at convenience stores throughout the nation; one junior and senior high school in Tokyo raised $23,000 in two days. More than 1,000 volunteer doctors and nurses have helped ease shortages; even the yakuza (Japan’s mafia) has pitched in.

Volunteers have taken over an array of tasks, including food distribution, cleanup and waste disposal. One propane gas company from the southern island of Kyushu loaded 20 workers into company trucks with tanks of gas, water and food. “It’s only natural to want to help others who are in need,” said Naoyuki Maeda, a director of Kyushu Kamata Gas Co.

Times staff writer Leslie Helm and Chiaki Kitada and Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.

* LAWMAKERS CRITICAL: The government is accused of bungling its quake response. A8