Documentary : KOBE: Block by Block : A somber city shakes loose from the rubble and faces the long haul toward rebuilding.

On my third walk through Kobe, more than a week after the earthquake, the city seemed more somber. The police had cordoned off the most dangerous areas, and in some areas downtown, pedestrians had to walk in the middle of the street.

You didn’t see people carelessly scrambling in and out of teetering buildings anymore, the way they had 48 hours after the quake, when I first arrived.

Shops were opening; food and gas were more available; there weren’t so many people sweeping up pieces of roof tile or glass or picking up fallen bricks. It had become clear that it would not be a matter of cleanup for Kobe, but one of demolishing more than 1,100 damaged structures downtown and many more than that in residential neighborhoods and then rebuilding.

Remaking Kobe was going to be a long haul. The adrenaline, the strange exhilaration, of the first days was gone. What remained was the ruined city, hundreds of thousands of homeless and the tragic loss of more than 5,000 lives.

I called a young Japanese American woman whose earthquake journal I had read. Five days after the quake, she had felt confident that when the rail line from Osaka was reopened as far as the suburb where she lived--in just a few days, she said--she and her roommate would be moving back to their apartment. It didn’t happen. She said the landlord had told tenants the water pump at the complex had been destroyed, and they couldn’t come back, not even when service was restored. It might even be a year, he said.

Kobe became far easier to enter and leave over my nine days covering the earthquake. Ferry service across the 10 miles of water to the port of Osaka became routine and uncrowded. Buses began service from downtown to the nearest open railroad stations.

Soon, earthquake denial--a psychological condition that impedes effective mitigation in so many endangered cities--began to manifest itself. In the elevator of my Osaka hotel, a man told a colleague he believed that the reports of earthquake damage in Kobe were exaggerated.

The hotel manager assured me that if another earthquake happened, the water-saturated soils that caused so many structural collapses in Kobe would not affect his high-rise near the port of Osaka.

“Our landfill is eight years old, so it’s solid,” he said with easy confidence.

But the damage was not exaggerated. It was appalling. And any observer could see that Kobe’s landfills, especially on its offshore islands, had not held up well, regardless of their age.

Osaka’s city government had taken a group of visiting American engineers and city disaster officials over to Kobe, along with a few reporters, two days after the earthquake, when I got my first look at the damage. Our boat stayed at the harbor only half an hour. If we were going to see Kobe, we would have to walk out, about 12 miles.

When we stepped ashore at the quayside, the concrete and tile under our feet were crumbled. The landward side of the landing had dropped three feet. The parking lot was so uneven with fissures and mounds and tented cement that no vehicle could cross it. The multistory ferry terminal seemed intact, but the ground beside it had slumped.

L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission, whom I accompanied on this daylong trek through the port city, seemed indefatigable in his curiosity, frequently taking side excursions, dipping into various business districts and neighborhoods.

It was an unforgettable view of what heavy shaking can do, with seemingly endless variations. Some eight-story buildings were intact but tilting at 30-degree angles. On other buildings, a middle floor had pancaked but not the floors above or below. One building remained erect, but the top half had twisted halfway around on its axis.

The traditional old wooden homes had fallen to pieces by the thousands, blocking the narrow streets. They were now just kindling, reminiscent of the remains of a Midwestern town hit by a tornado.

On our walk, we took a close look at the Hanshin Expressway, which had flopped on its side. Just as in some of the freeway collapses in Los Angeles’ 1994 Northridge earthquake, the fallen Hanshin span had become a signature image of the disaster, and as we approached, other people had stopped to take photographs and look at the demolition work.

Engineers explained that the expressway gave way at a connection point between steel and reinforced concrete. Still not clearly understanding how it happened, we stared in awe at this striking sign of the earthquake’s power.

After the Northridge earthquake, scientists were surprised to find how shaking intensities differed dramatically over short distances. Sometimes, in a few hundred feet, they varied two or three times in force.

Here in Kobe was renewed proof of this phenomenon. The damage seemed capricious. One or two blocks would seem relatively unscathed, and the next few blocks would be marked by one structural collapse after another. Yet even in the heart of the earthquake area, some were spared.

The most emotional sights were simple ones. A woman talking on the telephone, crying uncontrollably. A fire department rescue party loading a body onto a stretcher. A family sharing a meal prepared in its car beside a ruined home.

Kobe’s people were almost unfailingly quiet and polite. No one pushed, no one jumped a food line.

The determination of people came through. Even in buildings so shattered that they would have to be torn down, shopkeepers sometimes put together displays of their goods in a little open space. On the sidewalks, vendors sold simple meals.

The government’s salvage efforts seemed spotty. A week after the quake, rubbish collections had scarcely begun.

What a contrast in Osaka, just a few miles away. There it was mostly life as usual, although the hotels were crowded. With its garishly lit nightclubs and colorless factory districts, Osaka seemed as if the earthquake could have struck 100 miles away.

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