Alex in Wonderland

Remember the massive earthquake that happened in Japan at 5:46am on January 17, 1995? I do. It happened one month before I moved from New Zealand to Kyoto (45-minutes train ride away from Kobe). It hit at the end of a public holiday, just when everybody was gearing up for another year at the office. The inner-city area of Kobe was the hardest hit. High-rise buildings and homes were left in complete ruins. Many lives were lost. The official death toll stands at 6,434 people.

Minor earthquakes are commonplace in Tokyo and the Kanto region, but not so frequent in the Kansai region where Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka are situated. The Great Hanshin Awaji earthquake took residents completely by surprise. Few had earthquake insurance because of the unlikelihood of it ever happening in Kobe, and many lost everything they owned in the ensuing fires. I remember my junior at the Kyoto University Iaido Club telling stories of how he took turns with his brother guarding their crumbling house with bokutō in hand, in case nefarious thieves and looters visited in the middle of the night.

Exactly fourteen years have passed since that tragic day. If you saw Kobe now you would never know the city had experienced such a catastrophe. Kobe was rebuilt with incredible speed after the quake, and life was pretty much back to normal after two years. Beautiful new buildings replaced all those that were destroyed. Highways and public transport services were back to normal within a year, and greatly improved. Housing displaced residents was the hardest problem, and until recently, there were still people living in ‘temporary’ prefabricated housing.

The entire country got behind Kobe in their plight to rebuild. Thousands came from all over Japan to volunteer in the cleanup. Donations of food and clothing kept coming for many months after the quake. Even the celebrities in the monolithic Japanese entertainment industry, usually drunk in their own self-importance, actually did something useful for a change and volunteered for special fundraising programs and telethons to raise cash for the victims.

After the disaster there were countless complaints about the Japanese government's astounding inability to respond in timely fashion to such emergencies. There were also criticisms about the haphazard urban planning—a common problem in Japan—that made it almost impossible to prevent fires spreading through the suburbs. Hopefully they’ve learned their lesson. It’s really only a matter of time before another big one strikes some densely populated city in Japan. In fact, there was a tiny tremor as I was writing this blog. I kid you not!



Magnitude 7.2
Houses destroyed 153,099
Damaged 119,893
Fires 12,876
10 trillion yen in damage

(c) Alex Bennett 2009