Next Step : Kobe’s Aftershocks Include Housing Shortage : Eleven weeks later, controversy and uncertainty delay recovery. Relief camps may go through summer.

In late January, Hiroshi Murakami, deputy chairman of the Hyogo prefecture real estate dealers association, spoke with energetic determination about tackling Kobe’s housing crisis in the wake of the city’s devastating earthquake. But now, 10 pounds thinner, Murakami is visibly exhausted.

“Everybody is thinking just of themselves, demanding that their rubble be removed first, or that their home be repaired first,” said the dispirited realtor, who also runs a small construction company .

“Eighty-three families want me to remove debris from their property, 30 are asking for repairs, and all of them are telling me that the 20 or 30 years of association they have with me obligates me to favor them,” he complained.

“Right after the earthquake, people helped each other. They learned that people can’t live alone. But now everyone is becoming irritated . . . and reaching the limit of spiritual endurance.”

Ultimately, the prefecture, or state, hopes to solve the housing problem within three years. But the path to be taken between now and then remains uncharted.

“There is no clear outlook,” Murakami said.

And thus--although repair work is progressing smoothly on damaged infrastructure such as railways--new problems are erupting one after another in efforts to solve the housing crisis more than two months after the 6.8-magnitude quake struck on Jan. 17.

Hopes of providing temporary housing to all who need shelter by the end of April are fading, and refugees face an increasing prospect of remaining in relief camps into the summer. Urban renewal plans are sparking new controversy. And, for thousands of families, finding a permanent home remains a dream.

Kaoru Umemoto, 74, has enough savings to rebuild his destroyed noodle shop and second-floor living quarters. But he can’t find a contractor to do the job. As a result, he plans to lease a ship container and transform it into a home and shop after rubble is removed--this month, he hopes.

“I’ll never survive until the summer. I won’t be able to wait until then for a place to live,” said Umemoto, who is encamped in Hyogo High School, where 500 refugees have filled classrooms and hallways, 490 occupy the gymnasium and another 100 are living in tents on an athletic field outside.

Hyogo Gov. Toshitami Kaihara has announced a plan to build 125,000 housing units, 80,000 of them in Kobe, by March, 1998. About 150,000 units were destroyed in the earthquake but officials estimate that as many as 30,000 of those were not being used as dwellings.

Just to remove the rubble of destroyed structures will take two years, officials have said.

Housing for the elderly, who have suffered disproportionately, presents special problems. Officials are just now planning to establish “secondary refugee centers” at 20 locations for 1,500 elderly people who need special care. Already, as many as 500 elderly survivors forced to live in unheated relief centers in school gymnasiums may have died from illnesses such as influenza, Dr. Kozo Ueda, chief of the Kobe Kyodo Hospital, estimated.

School officials, citing the fear of fires, banned all heating devices, even electric blankets, Ueda said. But their real reason appeared to be fear “that classrooms might become permanent homes,” he said.

“Medicine was available for flu, but with so many people injured in the earthquake hospitalized, there were no hospitals that could take in old people who had colds,” Naoyuki Nakatsuji, head of the Nagata Care Home for the Aged, said. “Only when they came down with pneumonia did ambulances come.”

“Anyone could see that large numbers would die.”

Earthquake damage was particularly severe in coastal regions filled with wooden homes where elderly residents had lived since building the houses after World War II, Nakatsuji said. As a result, more than half of the nearly 5,500 people who died in the earthquake, as well as many survivors who lost their homes, were elderly people, he said.

Nakatsuji said he found elderly people rejecting help because they didn’t want to leave their neighborhoods. Many refused to move in with their children, fearing that tensions of living together in tiny homes might destroy familial ties. Or, Nakatsuji said, they believed that “if they sacrificed themselves, their children would be all right.”

“The old people wanted help from anyone but their families,” he said.

Mieko Tamura, 70, lives with her husband, Taizo, 74, in a “do-it-yourself” refugee center--on a couch next to the income tax department at the Ashiya City Hall, with the couple’s possessions stacked nearby.

She said their daughter had invited them to live with her. “But her house is small, and water and gas services still have not been restored there,” the mother said.

She has visited her daughter’s home several nights to get a good night’s sleep, however.

The prefectural government promised to complete the construction of 40,000 temporary housing units by the end of April, “but construction is going very slowly. It is likely to drag on into the summer,” said Ueda, the hospital chief.

By mid-March, the prefecture had turned over only 5,211 prefabricated homes and had housed 8,000 families in empty public housing units, mostly in other areas. About 64,000 refugees are still living in 731 relief centers.

Most of the 310,000 people who crammed relief centers at the peak of the crisis have sought shelter on their own, moving in with relatives or friends or returning to their damaged homes.

Officials hope that still more refugees will return to their homes when gas service is finally restored, so that the 40,000 temporary housing units they have promised will be enough.

But Kobe’s decision to build only 8,000 of the prefab homes in the districts with the largest numbers of refugees threatens to create a situation in which as many as 50,000 might refuse to leave relief centers, Ueda said.

Nakatsuji said disgruntlement with the government is particularly severe in Nagata ward, where 25,000 families lost their homes but only 349 prefabricated homes are being built. But general unhappiness has also created a bond among the ward’s residents. Many of them are burakumin, or outcasts, whose ancestors were assigned a non-human status under Japan’s social system in feudal days, a fact that promoted further bonding, Nakatsuji said.

Citizens’ groups in Nagata and elsewhere have protested urban renewal plans that would take land from individual owners to widen streets and build parks. Bureaucrats drew up the plans behind closed doors and approved them last month.

“Officials see the earthquake as an excuse to carry out urban plans without being forced to persuade each and every property owner one by one,” charged real estate agent Murakami.

Few of those who have found temporary accommodations on their own or through the government have mapped out a permanent future. Masaka Tosho, 63, who is living in the first prefab “village” that opened in Wakamatsu Park in Kobe in mid-February, said she and her retired husband, Hiroshi, 63, hope their son, 33, can help them build a home. She has no idea how long that might take.

“Even if we placed an order today, it would take more than a year for a carpenter to start work. And we don’t know how long it is going to take to remove the debris of our home,” she said.

Meanwhile, she is happy to have a place to stay after living nearly a month in a relief center: “At least here, the person sleeping next to me is not a stranger.”

Some survivors have moved back to structurally damaged, city-operated apartments that have been condemned, to press for assurances they can return once the apartments are rebuilt.

Kunio Okawa, who rents an apartment and runs a liquor store in one such condemned building, said he and 30 families were squatting in four adjacent condemned buildings to demand guarantees they will be allowed to return, although he recognizes the building is not safe. He sent his four children to a city 14 miles away to live with his wife and her family.

Bureaucratic regulations, however, prevent city officials from offering Okawa and the others the assurance they want. Under standards now in effect, the public housing corporation must build bigger apartments in buildings no taller than the existing ones, slashing the number of units by one-third.

In a relief center, Toru Takahashi, 74, a retired dockworker, said he has had a cold “all along” and also has high blood pressure. Only bread and milk are provided for breakfast, two rice balls for lunch. And, to take a bath, he and his wife must make their way to a bathhouse miles away.

His wife’s family has invited the couple to live on the island of Shikoku, more than 150 miles away, “but as the old saying goes, ‘where you live is the capital of your life,’ ” he said. “We’ve lived in Kobe for 45 years and we don’t want to leave.”

Takahashi said he would wait until the Kobe government offers him a prefab.

“I just don’t have the energy to find a place to live on my own at this age,” he said. “If I were 30, I would be happy to get a loan and start over myself.”

Tokyo Bureau researcher Megumi Shimizu contributed to this report.