The Great Kobe Quake

In the early morning hours of mid-January 1995 I was awoken by a jolt. It was a very minor jolt, but enough of one to make anyone from the West Coast sit up and wonder if they would have to go stand in the doorframe.

I took my 5:30 a.m. morning walk (I was nuts when I was 23--this WAS mid-January in the cold, cold Japan mountains) and came back to my house. My morning routine was to shower and then fix my miso soup and breakfast cereal, and watch the morning news in Japanese to boost my language skills (still my 1st year there).

Images started pouring in on Fuji-TV of fires illuminating the dark sky over Kobe. As morning dawned over the Land of the Rising Sun, we started to see entire freeways completely collapsed, bullet trains and local trains completely derailed, an entire metropolitan area destroyed. It was devastating.

Port of Kobe

I had friends in the area and, eventually, was able to contact them and found out that they had survived. Reports were coming out of Kobe and leaking to international media of deaths. One was that of a 20-something year old English teacher from Portland, Oregon. Although I was not from Portland, I had done my university schooling west of that city. I therefore had friends who thought me to be dead. I could not call home to my family and they could not call to me; the internet was not as widespread as it is today (remember, it was 1995) and I did not yet have my own computer.

As time went by, we learned about various countries' offers of assistance. However, Prime Minister Murayama at the time rejected all offers, in an extremely proud and idiotic gesture of Japan's independence and true island-nation identity, saying that Japan could take care of itself.

I will never forget watching the news when one man, sobbing, told a reporter that he would not have cared what color or from what nation the hand would have been that could have pulled his wife out alive from the rubble under which she was buried.

One boy lost his entire family. He happened to be a "big brother" to a younger boy, a role model, someone to whom he was not genetically related. The degree of post-traumatic stress he experienced was so extreme, he beheaded this younger boy some time after the quake and stuck the head on a fencepost surrounding the boy's school.

I am certain this is one of those many news items that never made it out of Japan. Japan does not like its international image to be tarnished. Japan wants to be seen as strong, invincible...it is the Samurai way, the Bushido, the samurai code.

Two months following the quake, Aum Shinri Kyo (the Aum Supreme Truth cult) attacked the Tokyo subway system with sarin gas. I had been in the Tokyo subway just the very day before. Aum got what it wanted; attention...and in the process, stole all the attention and assistance from the thousands still suffering the devastation of Kobe.

In May 1995 I visited Kobe for a conference. I stayed with the sister of a close friend from University who lived right in downtown Kobe. The devastation still surrounded us. Sleeping on the floor, as we did in Japan, we were awoken one morning with what was the most violent quake I had ever experienced. I had been in rolling quakes, shaking quakes...but this was a free-fall quake. It was as if we dropped 10 feet and slammed. All the plates jumped but stayed, ironically, put on the shelves. It was a free-fall, not a shake, so nothing was displaced. But it scared the living Shosta-frickin'-kovich out of me.

View from Sannomiya Station entrance

The photos posted here are a couple I took that May 1995 while visiting Kobe. I was so taken by the picture above, that so eerily resembled the Oklahoma City bombing site that had occurred just one month before.

Japan put itself back together, the country survived, and Kobe is again a thriving port city, twin city to Osaka. It is a beautiful city with a soul that is very powerful, a soul created by the spirit of survival. Yet the events surrounding the Kobe quake of 1995 highlighted for me some of Japan's huge weaknesses as a country trying to participate in a modern global society, weaknesses that perhaps aren't evident to the outsider...the 外人 gaijin.