Japan’s Premier Pledges Better Crisis Response : Disaster: Comments come as aftershocks continue in Kobe. 290,000 people remain in shelters.

As frightening aftershocks continued to hit this broken city, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on Wednesday pledged to strengthen crisis management in Japan.

Murayama made the promise during questioning in the upper house of Parliament. He offered no specifics but cited the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency as an example of one foreign system to be studied as a means to improve the government’s ability to react to disasters--and presumably to international crises as well.

Murayama’s comments came as residents of Kobe continued their struggle to restore some semblance of normal life, a difficult task with 290,000 people in the Kobe area still living in evacuation centers and with key access roads still clogged with traffic 10 days after the quake.

Late Wednesday evening, a 3.6-magnitude aftershock rattled buildings in Kobe, but there were no immediate reports of new injuries or further damage. At least eight more jolts occurred after midnight.

City officials set up 41 new emergency medical clinics Wednesday, bringing the total to 91, as influenza spread rapidly among evacuees still sleeping on floors in crowded, unheated schools and other buildings. Also in use are 67 vans operating as mobile medical clinics. With medical staff at surviving city hospitals on the edge of collapse from lack of sleep, the city was seeking additional help from doctors and nurses in other parts of Japan.

“We are trying to get reinforcements from all around the country,” a city official said. “Our medical people can’t keep going like this.”

Murayama told Parliament on Wednesday that the government was trying to speed flu medicine into the city.

“We are doing all we can to get medicine in,” he said.

One welcome development for evacuees was the arrival of temporary bathhouses at some relief centers, set up by troops from Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. About half the city still lacks running water.

Troops set up more public baths--big enough for 20 people at a time--in green military tents on Wednesday, after the first started operation Tuesday night.

“I feel like I’ve come back to life,” said a man shown on NHK television, his thinning gray hair still wet from his first bath since the Jan. 17 earthquake.

One of the steaming baths was set up in a tent at a Kobe pier, where ships from Osaka brought water to fill a large, rectangular tub. Wednesday was men’s day at the pier bath, and more than 600 men came to enjoy it. Today, women will use the facility.

At one refugee center, an eyeglass company showed up to provide new glasses for people who lost theirs in the quake.

“I can read newspapers again,” said one elderly woman who got new glasses.

Kobe citizens also did what they could to help one another.

At the Motomachi Street shopping arcade, the family of beauty-parlor owner Masahiko Chuma was serving passersby hot soup.

“The owner of the meat shop across the way said the pork would go bad if it weren’t used, so they gave it to us to do this,” Chuma said. “My home is OK, and water is running. We heated the soup with propane gas. There are so many people who can’t get hot food. So we decided to make soup and give it to anyone for free.”

At the Sannomiya shrine in downtown Kobe--dedicated to a goddess who is said to protect navigation, commerce and industry--a man was meticulously copying from shattered stone columns the names of contributors to the shrine’s post-World War II reconstruction.

The shrine’s main building suffered cracks but will survive, he said, but the entry gate and shrine office were a total loss. The names will be needed so they can be inscribed again on replacement stones, he said.

The burden of the evacuation effort is evident at the new Kansai International Airport in Osaka, where 1,000 quake victims have taken shelter.

Airport officials said they want to help but that they worry the evacuees’ presence might make passengers uneasy.

The South Korean government has offered help to Japan, with President Kim Young Sam ordering the dispatch of 100 tons of aid material, according to media reports. And the government eased regulations to make it easier for Korean residents here to have assets in South Korea sent to them.

Seoul also plans to dispatch a “Learn From Japan” mission to Kobe to study how the city has coped, the Joong Ang Ilbo newspaper reported Wednesday.

South Korean Prime Minister Lee Hong Koo said the mission will study the division of roles between the central government and local governments in rehabilitation work; how normal administrative structures can be converted to emergency structures, and how civilian organizations are utilized for rescue and reconstruction work.

Holley reported from Kobe and Jameson from Tokyo. Times researcher Chi Jung Nam in Seoul contributed to this report.