Japanese Lawmakers Assail Quake Effort : Disaster: Opposition charges government with ‘bungling.’ Death toll at 5,060, damage estimates reach $100 billion.

Turmoil erupted in Parliament on Monday over the government’s handling of Japan’s killer earthquake as the death toll surpassed 5,000, unofficial damage estimates rose to $100 billion and the stock market suffered its biggest drop in 3 1/2 years.

“Bungling” in the government’s handling of the disaster “showed that under the Cabinet of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, even the most minimum responsibility of the government . . . to protect the lives and property of the people . . . cannot be fulfilled,” former Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, now the leader of the main opposition party, charged in Parliament.

“If the government had responded quickly, many lives would have been saved,” said Kaifu, who heads the New Frontier Party.

Only last Friday, citing the early hour when the quake struck and saying, “It was my first experience,” Murayama acknowledged that “what could be considered confusion” had indeed occurred in his moves to cope with the devastation. But on Monday, the Socialist leader did a flip-flop and called his actions “the best possible decisions.”

Jeers nearly drowned out Murayama’s voice as he urged members of Parliament to unite with the government in coping with the nation’s worst natural disaster in 72 years.

Twice, Takako Doi, the lower house Speaker, asked futilely for silence.

By early today, the eighth day after the quake, the toll from the devastation in Kobe, a port city of 1.5 million, and environs had reached 5,060 dead, 96 missing and 26,284 injured. More than 56,200 buildings were destroyed or damaged beyond use.

Although a massive cleanup has already begun in the ravaged areas, investors’ worries about the quake’s impact on the economy struck a blow of their own on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, driving the Nikkei average down by 1,954 points, or 5.6%--its biggest drop in 3 1/2 years. Stocks closed Monday at 17,785.

As trading resumed in the afternoon today, stocks gained back 243.82 points.

The sharp plunge in stock values was triggered by growing fears that the destruction in Kobe will disrupt Japan’s economy in the short to medium term more than had been initially expected. But views differed widely over whether economic damage will remain concentrated in Kobe. Some in the city feared that many operations will simply be shifted elsewhere.

“Companies in Kobe that suffered severe damage are moving their operations to Osaka one after another,” said Tamotsu Kashiwai, part owner of the Kashiwai Paper Trading Co., which must recover from the total destruction of its nine-story headquarters building near downtown Kobe. “I don’t know whether they’ll come back to Kobe. Taking a mid- to long-term view, Kobe is an international port, and the major industry of Kobe was trading and exporting. Now more than one-third of the port of Kobe is damaged. Cargo can’t come in here. But shippers don’t need to use Kobe. Goods can go to Osaka or anywhere. If events progress in that direction, this place will be abandoned.”

“The major leisure area was in (downtown) Sannomiya and its Center Street shopping area, which has a fashionable image throughout Japan,” Kashiwai added. “People were coming here to shop and enjoy being here. That was the other base to Kobe’s economy, and it is completely destroyed.”

In the first official estimate, the Transportation Ministry reported that 11 railway companies suffered at least $4.1 billion in damage.

Hiroshi Suda, president of JR Tokai Railway, said his company will be forced to review the anti-earthquake standards of the world-famous 130-m.p.h. Bullet Line train, which was forced out of operation in the Kobe region.

Work crews in Kobe labored around the clock Monday and today to put new steel girders in place on a Hankyu Railway bridge leading into the commuter rail line’s downtown station. The bridge did not collapse in the quake, but its structural support suffered severe damage, said Mitsuhiro Emoto of Daitetsu Kogyo, one of three construction firms working simultaneously to shore up the bridge. The work site was only one of hundreds where demolition and repair efforts were under way in the city.

Overall, opposition leader Kaifu cited a possibility that damage from the earthquake will reach $100 billion. Sadatoshi Ozato, minister in charge of relief and rescue, predicted the figure, when known, will be “immense.” And Tadayo Homma, chief of the Bank of Japan’s Osaka branch, declared that the devastation “will affect all aspects of the economy, especially production, fixed investments and exports.”

Recriminations over the government’s handling of the crisis also emerged as Deputy Foreign Minister Kunihiko Saito called a news conference to deny that Japan had rejected offers of foreign assistance.

“We really wanted to accept as many offers as possible,” Saito was quoted as saying by the electronic Nikkei News Service. “But the most important thing was practical assessment of what kind of assistance was really needed by victims and helpers at the scene.”

Earlier, the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman offered the same explanation when asked why Japan had not accepted President Clinton’s offer to deploy U.S. troops in Japan while many victims remained trapped under ruins.

In Parliament, Kaifu condemned Murayama, chairman of the Socialist Party that until last summer had opposed Japan’s maintenance of armed forces, for his reluctance to call out Japanese troops. By the end of the first day, only 2,300 troops had been sent to the disaster area.

Kaifu, who bolted the formerly ruling Liberal Democratic Party last June when it entered a coalition with Murayama and his Socialists, also condemned the prime minister “for relying on TV for his information” and for failing to take command of rescue operations.

Murayama himself acknowledged that he heard of the Tuesday earthquake, which struck at 5:46 a.m., on TV shortly after 6 a.m. and only received his first government report on the disaster at 7:30 a.m. Four hours after the quake, Murayama said, he convened his Cabinet and set up emergency headquarters to deal with the quake aftermath.

Then, “at 4 p.m., I gave a news conference and announced my firm resolve to deal with the earthquake,” Murayama said.

“I took the best possible measures,” the prime minister insisted, as jeers rose from opposition members of the lower house.

Despite his attempt at self-defense, Murayama declared that he would be willing to consider strengthening the Japanese Cabinet’s crisis-management ability, which has often been criticized in relation to Japan’s handling of foreign issues--the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War in particular.

Later, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kozo Igarashi told reporters that there had been no problem in the speed with which word of the quake reached the government. But he admitted that the government had failed to comprehend quickly how vast the damage had been.

U.S. Ambassador Walter F. Mondale has given diplomatic support to Murayama by repeatedly commenting that any government would have had trouble coping with a disaster such as occurred in Kobe.

But Kosaku Inaba, chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, weighed in on the side of the critics, charging that the government’s response had been “insufficient in quality and quantity.”

Aftershocks continued to rattle Kobe on Monday, reviving fears among the 300,000 evacuees still crowded into school buildings and other relief centers and those remaining in their own homes. The strongest, registering magnitude 4.3, came after dark, shaking buildings and shattering glass in some places. More than 1,000 aftershocks have been reported since the quake, which was reported in Japan as a 7.2-magnitude temblor but which U.S. scientists measure as 6.8.

More than 100 of the aftershocks could be felt by people in Kobe.

Many of Kobe’s public schools reopened Monday, and plans for relocating evacuees moved forward when Hyogo prefecture, which includes Kobe, awarded a contract to build 11,000 prefabricated houses in the next month. The city of Yokohama and some other municipalities offered the use of vacant homes to quake survivors.

Officials have predicted that an influenza epidemic could break out in the crowded evacuation centers. And hospitals are coping with a shortage of medicine and supplies, as destruction of some transportation routes and overcrowding of others makes it difficult to bring in enough new supplies.

Jameson reported from Tokyo and Holley from Kobe.

* WORLDWIDE IMPACT: Quake fallout rattles markets in Tokyo and East Asia. D1, D2