14 years ago Saturday

14 years ago, I was living in Kobe, Japan.  For a day job, I worked in a warehouse (the only English speaker there) that handled western Japan’s distribution of fish food and aquarium supplies, and the Bebe line of kid’s clothes.  I taught private lessons in English to a few people two nights a week, and lived alone, my marriage in it’s death throes.

Little did I know that things would change DRAMATICALLY on January 17th, 1995.

This was Sogo Department store in downtown Kobe a few days after the quake.

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This is the roof of my apartment.

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This was my Chance Cat, and the door I broke to get out after the quake.

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Look closely and you will see some guy’s pride and joy, crushed: a Camaro Z-28 under the wreck of that building.

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Look closely here too and you will see McDonald’s Golden Arches in the rubble.  This was one of half a dozen McDonalds in Kobe – five of them were destroyed

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(This was originally written as a letter to friends describing the earthquake to friends in the US, and most of it has been posted to a web site about earthquakes. Although this was an interesting experience, once was more than enough for me. )

 

 

Kobe, Japan

January 31, 1995

We are alive, we are eating well, and we are living in the home of K*’s parents. If I have to carry buckets of water to the house every day and go without a bath, it is a very small price to pay for our lives. Five thousand ninety three people do not have these inconveniences, because they are dead. I can say with utter conviction that it could be worse.

This earthquake took nearly everyone by surprise. In living memory, there has never been an earthquake even remotely approaching this magnitude in Kobe. There is much criticism of the government’s response to the emergency, but I believe that this is unwarranted. No one can defend against the inconceivable. And I believe that nothing can stand the unimaginable forces that the earth can unleash. We slept at the epicenter of power beyond imagination and I can only wonder why none of us were injured.

Let me give you some statistics: 5093 people killed, 28,000 injured. 107,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Three major highways destroyed, and seven railways knocked out. Damage to the port of Kobe (world’s second largest container port and Japan’s largest) is estimated at between 9.5 and 10 Billion dollars. Some of the damage to infrastructure may never be repaired. And to me, the most amazing statistic of all is that all of this occurred in 15 seconds.

At 5:46 am, January 17, life as I know it came to an abrupt, shattering end. The apartment I was living in was severely damaged. The roof is gone. Everything that could fall d

id. I had gone to bed at 3am Monday night after a three-day weekend, worried about waking up in time to catch the bus to work the next morning. I had felt tremors here before; my house was old and shook easily, but the shaking at 5:46 like nothing I have ever felt before. I thought the place was collapsing around me as dirt from the roofing cascaded onto my head. The world was filled with a bass roar, and the sound of breaking glass, of roof tiles falling, and the shrieking of rending wood. It went on forever (I can’t believe it was only 15 seconds). I curled up in my bed and waited to see if I would die. After an eternity, the earth stopped moving. I was stunned and scared and full of adrenaline. Dust filled the air, choking me. In the pitch darkness, I threw back the covers and pushed my stereo set off me. I groped my way to my desk across the room where I knew I had left a flashlight. The one thought in my mind was to get the hell out of the house before it fell down on me. I knew that I had to get outside, had to get to the gas line and shut it off. I could not find the light-everything was on the floor, so I gave up and felt my way into the living room.

There, in a drawer of my bookcase, I had put another flashlight just the night before. But the bookcase had toppled onto my glass-topped coffee table. Books and glass were everywhere. The inner doors of the entrance hall leaned into the room, complementing the closet doors, which now were nowhere near the closet. The tilted drawers of the bookcase had spilled their contents everywhere. I scrabbled through the wreckage desperately once, then twice, and finally found the damn light. By a miracle, with the light I found my glasses, my pants, and a jacket. I crammed my passport and bankbook in one pocket, my wallet in another, and climbed over the furniture to the front door.

The door was jammed. For days afterwards my back hurt from the force I used to open the door. All I could think of was to get to the gas main. And I did. Outside, everything was a shambles. Roof tiles clogged the street. Dust filled the air. Smoke was already rising just south of my neighborhood. The smell of gas filled the world.

I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me to worry about K* (my wife) and her parents whom she had stayed with that night. Their house is right around the corner from mine, but the first place I went was to my next-door neighbor’s. Their place had partially collapsed and I helped them out of the wreckage, cut their gas, and then ran to the street where K*’s parents live.

I could hear gas hissing out of broken pipes. I saw a woman carrying a lit candle and jumped her, snuffing the candle. I had just enough presence of mind to speak Japanese the whole time. I could see flames licking the sky just a quarter mile away. Everybody was in the street by now, their faces white in the rising dawn. K* came out of the gloom and hugged me.

I remember those minutes well, but the next 8 or 10 hours are a long blur. The family was uninjured, their house only moderately damaged. I left K* and her Mom to the cleanup and wandered around, looking at the place I’ve known for almost ten years. The fire to the south grew larger, the smoke denser. I went to look.

It was obvious to me that there were far too few firemen, and far too little water to stop the fire. They tried to contain it, but as I watched, I saw one home after another consumed. Ordinary people grabbed hoses and sprayed the flames, but at least 60 homes were gone already. I circled the burning area, surveying the extent of it. I could see it was spreading. We live only a quarter mile away and I was afraid the fire would come to my area. During the day I kept going back and checking the progress of the fire. At one point, the wind shifted, and burning embers swirled over me, burning holes in my nylon flight jacket. By that time, I had found my camera and was taking pictures. Some buildings that were standing when I shot them are piles of cinders now. The fire here raged for 17 hours before it died and left almost 200 homes destroyed.

After the threat of fire, weather became our next concern. We were lucky in that the rains held off for almost week after the quake. Plastic tarps became as rare as bathing, but on Saturday the 21st, we bought 8 tarps and spent the day covering the roof of this house. We were not alone-as far as I could see, people were doing the same. Our roof sustained fairly light damage, but the roof of my apartment looked too dangerous to deal with. K*, my brother in law, and I spent 5 hours cleaning the broken tiles from the roof and tarping it over. As I look at it now, I think we did a pretty rinky-dink job, but the next day when it rained hard, we had no water in the house.

I wish I could say the same thing for my place, but it’s falling apart, so we packed most of my things up and brought them here, and covered the furniture with tarps.

For the more than 290,000 people in shelters, weather is also a concern. Temperatures have hovered around freezing since the quake, and snow flurries have fallen the last few days. Most of the shelters are schools-the elementary school in my neighborhood has more than 400 people staying in it. This school was a shelter during the last citywide emergency-World War Two.

An Army now occupies Kobe and the surrounding cities for the first time since 1945. This time, of course, it is the Japanese Self Defense Force, which is assisting in the emergency with thousands of troops, trucks, construction equipment, and tents. Some areas of the city look like they have been carpet-bombed. There’s just nothing left. People have told me over and over that this looks like the war days to them. Kobe was quite heavily bombed during the war, and much of the city dates from the post-war period. Fifty years is a long time for some buildings and many of these just fell down.

For the first ten days I did not leave my neighborhood, and I thought that the foreign news that we watched on satellite was playing up the worst of the disaster. But three days ago, K* and I went to a local park where tarps were being given out and met a photographer from the States who’d come to take pictures. She did not speak any Japanese, so K offered to help her out. We spent last Friday touring the city and translating. I realized then that the news had not really seen the worst of the damage. The human scale of the damage is unbelievable, even to myself, and I’m here.

Whole areas have literally ceased to exist. I have yet to exhaust my capacity for amazement at the catastrophic level of damage. After escorting Jane the photographer around, I realized how lucky we really were.

During the first week of the disaster, the roads were so bad that food and other supplies simply could not get in. The elevated highways that you saw collapsed ran above the surface highways, which were blocked by the debris. Our family luckily had both food and water from the beginning. Both K*’s parents were children during the war and remember starving. K* says this made them determined to never be hungry again, and

so we have more than enough food.

The most amazing thing about this experience for me is that there was no panic. There was no looting. Shops opened the day of the quake. Cleanup started immediately. People stood in lines for food and water and were quiet and patient. Those who had money paid for what they received and those who had none also received basic necessities. Many banks were devastated, but they set up offices in other banks that were still functioning. Money is not a problem at this point.

 

February 1 1995

We have fewer and fewer aftershocks every day. The "experts" still say we could have another big one at any time, but I feel that we probably won’t. I knocked on wood as I wrote that, too.

They say there’s been about 1400 aftershocks so far. Only a few hundred have been felt. It’s strange, but at night, I can hear then coming–a low bass rumble, and then the house moves a bit. In the days right after the quake, the house moved quite a bit. My poor apartment is coming apart day by day. Oh well.

Yesterday, the Emperor of Japan visited the area. He is a kindly looking man who resembles my Father-in-law. The people he met seemed genuinely grateful for his concern. Last week, the Prime Minister, Mr. Murayama, also visited but people seemed unimpressed. One delicious news report showed an old woman in a shelter contemptuously remarking that his visit was all well and good, but meant nothing. That clip was shown over and over, and that, along with other clips of Parliamentary wrangling has done little for the government’s image. The Western media has taken to criticizing the government’s reaction to the disaster, but people here do not seem much interested in the national government’s actions so much as in the local governments’. The Emperor’s visit was different, though. I wish I’d seen him too.

 

Things are slowly getting towards–well if not normal, then stabilizing. Daily, roads and rail lines reopen lines to the outside. Rush hours have returned as people return to work. My job, which I had thought lost, looks like it might resume after all. The warehouse I work in is on Port Island, an artificial island in Osaka Bay. I drove there the other night. The building is alright (who knows about inside though) but the whole island sank almost a meter into the bay. The buildings all look like they’ve punched up through the ground. I doubt that things will be normal there for a long time. The Company President called me the other day and asked if I want to work. I do. My three-day weekend has turned into a three-week vacation in Disaster Land and I’d like some dull old normal life again.

Some of you know that I was planning to return to Portland for summer school this June. K says that one way or another that I’ll get there. It’ll be nice to see an undamaged, clean city. Kobe was a beautiful city, a nice mix of ancient and modern. It traces its history to the 12th century when the first port of Hyogo was established, and I don’t doubt that it will be beautiful again someday. But for now, I’d like to see a clean, unmarred city. I look forward to June and a summer in Oregon.

Many of you have asked what we need. I need a bath, a good shave, and some clean socks. Seriously, we don’t need for anything, but your prayers and well wishes are much appreciated. There are many others who need more. Temporary housing has been erected amazingly fast in our local park and relief supplies are flooding in. We will be ok.

 

February 3 1995

Yesterday new damage estimates were released. These now total $95 Billion. Such a sum is impossible to imagine–except looking around, I think it will rise higher yet. 5243 people are now known to have been killed. It’s clear that life will be different here for the foreseeable future. Still, I’m amazed at how hard people are working to return to normal life.

Well, it’s time to get this out to you. It’s been good to write this down and get some of it out of my head. I’ll keep you posted on events here. Thank you for your calls and letters–they have helped us through a difficult time.

 

K. A. M.