Two hi-res pictures

On January 17th, 1995, I was living in Kobe, Japan.  At 5:46 am, a 7.2 earthquake struck, centered on a faultline just off the coast of the city.  More than 5000 people were killed immeadiately.  Had the quake occured just 20 minutes later, the damage and devastation would have been much worse, because people were still in bed, not up and cooking or commuting.  As it was, large fires started.  The one in my neighborhood burned for 18 hours.

I had been in bed, anticipating getting up in just a little while to go back to work after a three day weekend.  When I laid down the night before (actually, in the early morning) I had chosen between my bed in the sleeping area of my apartment, and a futon I had on a shelf in the closet in the front room.  I liked sleeping in the closet sometimes- it was a very enclosed space and sometimes it felt more secure than the bed in the open middle room of my apartment. 

It was fortunate that I chose as I did – cement roof roof tiles fell through the roof of the apartment in the section right above where my head would have been, had I slept in the closet.

Below is my roof:

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Japanese homes traditionally have very heavy roof tiles to protect the lighter structures beneath from being damaged or destroyed by the typoon winds that wrack the islands of Japan.  These heavy roofs were the death of many in the quake, because their roofs fell in on them as they slept.  Some people, and not a few, mind you, were trapped in their homes by their roofs and were unable to escape the fires that roared through whole sections of the city.  They burned to death trapped under their roof tiles.

This is the street in front of my apartment:

Both my neighbor and I were lucky – our roofs slid off the structures and landed in the streets on either side.  My apartment was the one with the A/C unit in front of it, just behind the ladder leaning againt the wall of the apartment next door.

This is early on the day of the 17th.  Later that day, I appropriated a shovel and a sledge hammer from a nearby construction site and cleared a path throught the rubble.  In the background, you can see how a neighbor’s walls leaned into my street – I used the sledge hammer to knock them down, and the shovel to clear a walking trail through the roof tiles on the ground.

My apartment, while still standing, was uninhabital, so I moved into my parents in law’s home around the corner.  I didn’t find my cat for days.  There had been, in the front wall of my apartment, a vent near the ground, whose screen I knocked out to create an entrance for my black cat, Chance, so he could go in and out with no help from me. When I had gone to bed, he had been sleeping on the couch in the front room.

After the quake, he was no where to be found, and as I cleaned up outside, I feared that I would find him crushed beneath the roof tiles that clogged the street.  As I wandered the neighborhood, I called out his name, as were other pet owners in the area, hoping that he would come to me.

I had gone around the block, hope fading, but as I crossed the concrete culvert that ran below the intersection of my apartment street with the main street through the neighborhood, I heard a pitiful meow from below.  There he was!  Apparently, when the quake first struck, he had pissed on the couch and had fled out the cat door to the safest place in the area, that concrete culvert.  Cats are smart.  Our home was wrecked, but it was shelter, so he stayed in the neighborhood of the apartment where I set out food for him and the other cats made homeless by the quake.  The warehouse I was working in was the western Japan supply point for many pet stores, and I had taken home several broken bags of cat food before the quake.  I had over an hundred pounds of dry cat food, so I became the cat man of the nieghborhood, feeding homeless cats.

In fact, it was days before Chance would even come near my apartment.  There were hundreds of aftershocks, and he would run for the culvert every time, leaving me to hope that my tottering apartment wouldn’t fall down on me.

I wrote extensively about my experiences in the quake’s aftermath here.

For weeks after the quake, life was stripped down to the bare essentials: find food.  Carry water to my PIL’s house. (cuz the water and gas pipes broke)  Find cigarettes and the occaisional bottle of Bourbon.  (I "rescued" the last bottel of Jim Beam Black label from my neighborhood liquor store)The city was devastated, and most of the city’s employee’s homes were damaged or destroyed, so there was very little organised help activities going on at first.

In the Middle East, we’ve been hearing about how Hezbollah is helping rebuild Lebanon – hearing that with a tinge of disdain.  In Kobe, it was the Yakuza, organized crime families, who provided the first help their neighborhoods saw.  The government was helpless, so the Yakusa stepped up and provided food and water and shelter for the many without, just as Hezbollah is doing now in Lebanon.  The Yakusa was organized, had money, had food and water, and distributed these things without regard to whether people could pay for them or not.  That was beside the point – people needed help, and they had it to give, and did.

11 years later, my former wife tells me that the city is nearly back to, and in some cases beyond where it was that day.  If I could, I would go and see it myself, and when I can, I will.

Click on the link above for more about this experience, but for now, let me say that once was more than enough.

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