Tokyo Offers Aid as Kobe Struggles to Pick Up Pieces

Demolition, emergency repairs and construction accelerated here Tuesday as the government declared this crippled city a disaster area and offered special tax cuts to victims of Japan’s worst earthquake in 72 years.

With convenience stores and some other shops reopened, the less damaged parts of the city took on an appearance of near-normality. But in other places, clouds of dust rose as huge cranes tore into crumbled buildings of concrete and steel. Aftershocks that were still hitting the city today, the ninth day after the quake, made sharply leaning buildings a safety threat as they appeared on the verge of collapse.

Adding to the noise and sense of continued crisis was the frequent roar of military helicopters overhead, some carrying bodies to distant crematories.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s Cabinet approved the disaster-area designation as criticism continued of the government’s handling of rescue efforts after the Jan. 17 quake, which killed more than 5,000 people. The decision means the national government will subsidize up to 90% of the cost of rebuilding public infrastructure such as schools, roads, ports and railways.

The Finance Ministry unveiled a series of measures to help individuals who suffered losses in the quake. Victims whose property losses exceed their annual income plus insurance payments will not need to pay income tax for 1994, the ministry said. City income taxes and real estate taxes will be reduced for quake victims, as well.

Finance Minister Masayoshi Takemura said he had asked ministries to compile requests for a second supplementary budget for the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, to finance earthquake relief and reconstruction. An earlier supplementary budget was aimed at economic stimulation. Takemura also said he would consider another supplemental budget for fiscal 1995. Although the Kansai Electric Power Co. declared that electricity had been restored throughout the devastated area, it warned that only temporary repairs had been made and urged residents to restrict their use of electricity.

More than 852,000 households remained without gas, and 650,000 homes still had no water. Service to about 17,000 telephones remained disrupted. Full restoration of all services is not expected for 1 1/2 months.

Members of Kobe’s large ethnic Korean community--many born in Japan but lacking Japanese citizenship--remain among the hardest hit in the quake, along with a large population of burakumin , a group indistinguishable from other Japanese except for a history of holding low-prestige occupations such as leatherwork and shoemaking.

Many of these families lived in the old wood and tile-roofed homes of the Nagata district near downtown Kobe that was devastated by fire. Shoemaking factories were also concentrated in this area. With many blocks of these neighborhoods in ashes, recovery for these groups will be especially difficult.

Many of Kobe’s streets remain blocked by debris and the ruins of collapsed buildings. Police tried to restrict traffic on major highways to emergency vehicles bringing supplies into the city, but traffic remained jammed on the main highway to Nishinomiya.

In a community baseball field, along railway lines and on other public land, workers quickly assembled prefabricated housing, hoping to complete 1,000 units within a month. But not nearly enough land is available to build housing for any but a small fraction of those whose homes have been rendered unlivable.

“I think they’ll be living here for at least a year,” said Tadao Tsumura, who was supervising construction of 140 homes on a sandy baseball field. “People who get in will be fortunate.” The city plans to hold a lottery to determine who gets the right to move into the prefabricated homes.

For the 300,000 people still crammed into unheated emergency evacuation centers or living in tents set up in parks, the threat of illness is rising now, a week after the earthquake, authorities said.

Tsuneo Kanbayashi, chief of the Red Cross Hospital in Kobe’s Central Ward, said many refugees and residents of the port city of 1.5 million people are being hospitalized with influenza. Flu began to spread Sunday as the first post-quake rain fell amid temperatures that had hovered around freezing.

The earthquake has also taken an emotional toll. Japan’s Meteorological Agency was swamped with phone callers asking worriedly about rumors that a major quake was about to strike Tokyo.

Recalling rumors after the 1923 Great Tokyo Earthquake in which more than 100,000 people died, Transportation Minister Shizuka Kamei appealed to people to remain calm. “People should be prepared for earthquakes but should not allow themselves to be misled by rumors,” he said in a news conference.

On Tuesday, Self-Defense Forces personnel finally started airlifting bodies out of the stricken region, where only three crematories, all in Kobe, were reported operating. Damage to other crematories and the lack of water, needed for the cremation process, all but halted disposal of bodies last week.

This afternoon, the toll of dead reached 5,070, with 69 people still reported missing. Temporary “resting places” for corpses have been set up in gymnasiums, and unidentified bodies were being kept at nearby temples.

In Parliament, Michihiko Kano, “foreign minister” of the opposition New Frontier Party’s shadow Cabinet, renewed the attack on Murayama’s handling of the crisis. He chastised the Socialist prime minister for allowing “nit-picking and bureaucratic bickering” to forestall acceptance of assistance from foreign countries, including an offer from President Clinton to make available the full resources of the U.S. Defense Department.

People in other countries “wanted to make donations, and we couldn’t respond to them. This is most unfortunate,” Kano said.

A total of 48 countries, plus the European Union and two United Nations organizations, had offered assistance, according to the Foreign Ministry. As of Tuesday, 12 offers had been accepted.

The U.S. military has 47,000 troops in Japan. So far the Japanese government has accepted only blankets and plastic sheeting, and allowed U.S Marines to set up 20 tents for evacuees.

But the Ministry of Health on Tuesday relaxed licensing restrictions that had limited the role of volunteer foreign doctors to allow the physicians to treat earthquake victims in Kobe.

Opposition members of Parliament persisted in their criticism of Murayama for delaying the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces troops to rescue victims trapped in the debris of collapsed buildings. More than 74,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged beyond use by the quake. “What were you thinking of?” opposition member Akira Kuroyanagi demanded of the prime minister.

Murayama said the government would spare no effort to improve disaster preparedness but avoided any apology.

Holley reported from Kobe and Jameson from Tokyo.