Year After Kobe Quake, Crisis Brings Change

The television cameras are long gone, the scenes of fiery devastation have mostly faded from memory. But people like Tsurukichi Matsuyama and Masanori Hamada are still coping with the confusion caused by the ferocious temblor that killed 5,500 people and devastated this chic metropolis in western Japan.

Matsuyama, 53, is engulfed in a personal maelstrom. His life’s assets vanished in seconds as flames triggered by the Jan. 17 quake consumed his home and shoe factory. His income has plunged by 90%. Nearly a year later, his family of five still lives in a public hall in a cramped space partitioned by cardboard. His stomach is torn by ulcers; he fleetingly considered suicide to obtain life insurance money for his family.

But the gaunt, proud man refuses to accept welfare, and, however difficult it gets, he plans to tough it out in Kobe and rebuild his business.

“It’s a matter of dignity,” he says. “I’m doing this for my children.”

For Hamada, a leading civil engineer, the quake destroyed many of his fundamental assumptions about the kind of temblor that would strike Japan and the extent of damage it would wreak. He was so confident of the nation’s preparedness that he recalls dismissing early news reports that the Kobe quake had caused the collapse of “bullet train” tracks.

But the quake did demolish the tracks--and damaged 400,000 homes, 9,400 roads, 320 bridges, 1,300 concrete walls, 1.2 million water mains and 1.1. million power lines in a sweep of devastation that stunned experts. The Japan Civil Engineers Assn. plans to release a weighty report next month urging the nation to scrap the standards upon which much of the national infrastructure is built.

Many Areas Unsafe

The implications are staggering: It means that much of Japan is unsafe from a temblor of Kobe’s magnitude, despite this nation’s prodigious efforts to build a quake-safe society. The group’s recommendations, if implemented, will require huge sums for construction and reinforcement of untold numbers of bridges, roads, subways, reclaimed land areas and the kind of older wooden buildings that crushed to death thousands in Kobe--but still make up more than half the nation’s housing stock.

“We were overconfident,” Hamada says. “Now we are in confusion.”

From personal angst to professional confusion, Kobe is challenging Japan to rebuild and rebound, to embrace swift, stunning change with dogged resilience.

The disaster, after all, was only the first and biggest event in what became a Year of Shock for Japan that turned bedrock beliefs on their head: that a killer quake would never occur in the Kansai region, that a terrorist attack such as the one on Tokyo subways would never strike this peaceful nation, that a recession would never linger so long in this economic powerhouse.

Even the most stable of all arrangements--the U.S.-Japan security alliance--was rocked by an Okinawa rape that unleashed a massive protest against U.S. military bases and forced the Japanese government to begin weighing measures to relocate American forces from the southern island.

As this transformative year draws to a close, a return to Kobe offers rich testament to Japanese resilience and adaptability.

While it is often said that Japan mainly changes under crisis--U.S. gunboats opened it to the West, its wartime defeat ushered in democracy--it is also said that, when Japan does adapt, it does so rapidly.

Crisis came to Kobe--and so has blinding change.

“I expected more depression, apathy and powerlessness spreading all over the city, and I don’t see that,” says Shigeo Tatsuki, a sociology professor at Kwansei Gakuin University near Kobe. “What I see are people working and going Christmas shopping--in that sense, the resiliency is amazing.”

Focus on Future

Tatsuki rejects the idea that there is anything particularly Japanese about this characteristic, preferring to view it as a human response to crisis. But he says the commonly used phrase shoganai--”It can’t be helped”--helps the Japanese to move beyond the past, avoid wallowing in self-pity and focus on the future.

As shopkeepers start from scratch and families struggle to adapt to austere lifestyles, many here have even taken upbeat attitudes amid their myriad woes. Closer family ties, stronger self-identities, less materialism and a feeling of kinship with those of different races and religions have bloomed in the bleak soil of the disaster’s aftermath, residents say.

And beyond Kobe, the disaster has triggered an overwhelming response of research, review and retraining as experts struggle to absorb and adjust to the information revealed. The Kobe University Earthquake Library, opened in October, has already amassed more than 3,000 books and reports on the disaster, on subjects ranging from medical care and civil engineering to telecommunications and literature. Even the national dental association weighed in with a report on how to safeguard dentures during a quake.

Villages that never believed themselves vulnerable to earthquakes are investigating potential faults beneath them. Cities--such as Hikone, northeast of Kobe--have hosted extensive disaster drills, complete with destruction of wood houses to rescue mock victims and derailment of a train to practice repairing it. Although they normally provoke a yawn, the exercises this year drew 50,000 participants from five prefectures, a Hikone city spokesman said.

In the disaster zone of Hyogo and in other prefectures, police, fire and other services will be granted a radio frequency designated for emergencies. This solves one of the major post-quake problems experienced in Kobe: the authorities’ inability to communicate with each other when the telephone system went down.

The central government has already beefed up national guidelines on disaster response from a vague 15 pages before the quake to 200 detailed pages dealing with what became thorny matters in Kobe, such as how to more smoothly accept international aid and volunteers.

Responding to widespread criticism that the military Self-Defense Forces were called in too late, the new guidelines clarify a commander’s right to order troops in on his own judgment if civilian authorities cannot be reached.

Some Kobe officials want to go even further by giving troops primary control of disaster operations in the earliest emergency stage--a startling proposal in a nation still sensitive to the military excesses of the past.

The issue of who will clearly lead in a crisis is a problem Japan has not yet solved--and, says Kobe official Seiichi Sakurai, one that may not be solvable under the current Japanese system in which government is run by bureaucratic consensus. “Japan has taken this path because it’s more democratic, but in an emergency it doesn’t work well,” he said.

Japan’s biggest struggle still lies ahead: how to rebuild and reinforce countless structures throughout the country that loom as potential deathtraps. In an emergency program, the government has begun to reinforce 28,000 highway pillars, and some local areas are offering subsidized home-safety checks. In October, the city of Yokohama began offering the nation’s most generous program, paying the $250 checkup fee and sponsoring low-interest loans to reinforce vulnerable homes.

But Hamada, the civil engineer, says his association will announce next month that a new building standard itself should be established based on the degree of “ground acceleration,” or motion, that occurred in the Kobe quake--nearly double current design levels.

Hamada says he can’t even begin to guess the total cost or catalog the practical difficulties of the herculean work, which will include tearing up roads, stopping subway service and drilling through underground mazes of pipes in this densely populated nation.

“It’s overwhelming,” Hamada said. “It would be cheaper and easier to move Tokyo.”

Rebuilding Their Lives

As experts nationwide study how to rebuild, Kobe residents are struggling with the task of reconstructing their lives. As winter’s chill sets in, stirring memories of that awful January morning, residents--as they share their tales of lessons learned over the past year--show glimpses of the pain, anger and psychic exhaustion they still feel.

But, in the end, most return to feelings of gratitude for small kindnesses rendered to them and the warm circle of family and friends who sustained them.

Shopkeeper Shiro Ueda, still so fragile that he often stopped to wipe away tears during a recent interview, says the cohesiveness of his merchants group and family support helped him repair his broken life. He watched his home and family apparel shop--started by his father in 1934--go up in flames, along with 92 of 98 other stores in his local shopping district. Dumbfounded, he could only think, “What am I going to do from tomorrow?”

But two weeks after the disaster, the closely knit merchants group began meeting to hammer out a renewal plan--and in June, its members opened Pararu, a temporary shopping center housed beneath a tent. They received some public funding and a generous offer by a major contractor to delay payment until merchants got back on their feet; most merchants also received an average $20,000 or so in aid from friends and relatives, he says.

When the merchants manage to build a permanent new shopping district four or five years down the road, Ueda is determined to ensure that all his comrades--even those without money--can move in.

“We’re all friends who have come this far together,” Ueda said, tears welling up in his eyes.

Sumiko Yamamoto’s life has also taken a radical turn. She successfully ran a home-goods store and never imagined that she would one day be chopping green onions in a struggling restaurant venture housed in a temporary structure atop a pile of rubble in Kobe’s fire-razed Nagata district. Nor did she ever believe that she and her family of four would be living off a friend’s charity in a borrowed apartment after she and her husband finally saved enough to buy a home about five years ago.

Tears, Adjustment

But flames destroyed her home and business--leaving only the bleak prospect of a $400,000 loan to be repaid. The family switched gears and started a restaurant, figuring people had to eat, but sales have been slow, and the stress of overwhelming change initially drove Yamamoto to tears every day.

Today, however, she shrugs off her fate as shoganai and says she has adjusted.

She lives one day at a time and counts her blessings: Her family safely escaped, while some of her neighbors had to make the horrifying choice of leaving loved ones behind to burn to death as flames closed in on their prison of rubble. Her children, ages 13, 15 and 18, have buckled down to ease their parents’ burdens--one managing to pass the college entrance exam on the first try when normally passing probably would have taken several tries, Yamamoto says.

Still, Yamamoto fights to maintain her composure as she opens her memories and contemplates her life.

“Ah, it’s tough,” she said, heaving a deep sigh. “I don’t want to think about it too deeply.”

But for some, the disaster has, over time, triggered dramatic improvements in their family life or self-identities.

Yoshio Kawashima, a child guidance counselor, says his wife, Ryoko, and son, Yoshitaka, 13, had long suffered strained relations over her long working hours as a nurse and inability to be a full-time mother. But during the disaster, the son visited the hospital, saw for the first time his mother’s heroic work--and changed his view of her, Kawashima says.

“He came to feel that his mother working is more useful to society than staying home and cooking,” he said.

But not all Kobe residents are adjusting so well.

Masahito Iwaki, 51, is jobless, homeless and visibly bitter about what he calls a lack of official support. He and his family of five are still housed on the floor of a public meeting hall with no bath. Kitchen facilities are outdoors. Unless local authorities cough up $2,000 per family for New Year’s money, Iwaki is threatening a move to occupy City Hall.

And once he gets back on his feet, he says, he’s through with Kobe.

“Before, I thought Kobe was the most beautiful city in the world,” Iwaki said. “But a city that can’t even back up people in trouble is shameful.”

Tearing Down Walls

Nam Shin Kil and Yoon Woo Soon do not see it that way.

A year after the quake, they are men transformed. Both Korean Japanese, they say the disaster tore down the racial and national walls between them and their neighbors. During the desperate first days after the disaster, Nam and his fellow Koreans provided hot soup to those in need; the hungry Japanese gratefully gulped down their spicy broth and fiery pickled vegetables.

As a result of ties forged in those days, Nam is now often cited in local newspapers for heading efforts to transform the demolished Nagata district into an “Asia Town” to help lure tourists and solidify links among previously scattered Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos and Chinese in the area.

Glowing with a new pride, Nam has begun to use his Korean name in public for the first time, rather than the Japanese name he had previously used.

Yoon, 33, a pinball-parlor businessman, began volunteering to broadcast disaster-related news in Korean for an FM radio station--and it changed his outlook on life.

“Before, I couldn’t even imagine helping people for free. Money is the most important thing in a capitalist society,” he said. But after he began his broadcasts and felt the gratitude of those he touched, he thought: “What is important is the relationship between person and person, heart to heart.”

Volunteerism, he says, will now be a permanent fixture in his life.

“Of course it was scary, but a lot of us in Kobe believe the earthquake was a really good experience,” Yoon said. “Rich and poor alike all reverted back to zero, and we did our best to come back.

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.