On January 17, 1995, I was awoken in my apartment to the east of Osaka by a sensation familiar to all long-term residents of Japan – the rhythmic rocking of the entire building. “A big one,” I remarked, as pots and pans clattered to the kitchen floor and the water in the bathtub sloshed over the sides. The swaying lasted about a minute, but the power stayed on and the sturdy concrete structure soon settled back down with only a few small cracks visible. It was only when I arrived at work to find my office trashed and saw the vast palls of smoke climbing into the skies over Kobe to the west that I realized that something catastrophic had occurred.
The following day, I was dispatched by my employer to find out what had happened various friends and colleagues. With a bundle of plastic sheets and supplies strapped behind me, I set off on my motorcycle.
Among the places on my rounds that harrowing day was the small natural history museum in the grounds of the Kaisei Hospital, run for fifty years by Dr. Norio Kikuchi. Happily he had survived, as had the building, and we sat together for a while on the nearby sea wall before surveying the damage together.
As a young medical intern in the years immediately after World War II, Dr. Kikuchi and his friends regularly toured the Amami Islands in a truck, stopping at each village to set up a clinic. Scattered in the East China Sea, far to the south of Japan’s mainland, the islands were among Japan’s poorest and most remote places. Their people lived mainly by fishing and subsistence farming, and outside the small towns there were no medical facilities at all. The young doctors from the mainland brought basic checks and care and were made welcome by everyone. After the day’s last clinic they would stretch a sheet over the side of the truck and show movies – the only ones many of the islanders ever saw, and vividly remembered even today by many in their eighties and nineties.
In the faded pictures displayed on his museum wall, Dr. Kikuchi is a tanned young man on a great adventure, in a time when the whole country was living from day to day in rubble and chaos. Now we sat in silence as he smoked his inevitable cigarette and gazed at the shore. “It’s a mess in there,” he remarked with a wry smile, “I’ll show you.”
The shutter over the main door rattled up, and immediately I could see what had happened inside. As the building lurched, all the cabinets had detached from the walls and fallen forward, their drawers sliding out as they toppled. Thousands of specimens lay scattered, strewn in a great flood across the floor and up against the glass door. Their boxes had opened, and the labels had fluttered out to cover every surface like thick snow. Dr. Kikuchi grimaced, then clapped me on the back. “Well, at least we’ve got something to do now!” he grinned.
Time and again in the weeks that followed, I remembered his words. In the wreckage of the city, where eight-story buildings had toppled onto their sides and railroad tracks lay twisted like uncoiled rope, people worked in a way I had never seen before. With incredible speed they cleared pathways through the devastation, searched the ruins for survivors and bodies and began the seemingly insurmountable task of restoring their homes. With the fires extinguished and the main roads clear, survivors returned to salvage what they could from the mounds of debris. All around them, a massive effort was under way to bring back electricity, water and transport. Crews from the utility companies toiled alongside local government workers, police and construction teams in a massive, coordinated effort to push back the mess and put the whole city right. To a nation that travels by train, the reopening of the first line through the city just days later had immense significance. Within a month, all four main lines were running again; by year’s end new buildings were rising all around, and many of those displaced were already contemplating the day when they would return to their neighborhoods.
Everyone I knew back then had the same attitude in the days and weeks that followed the quake. They took this mighty sucker-punch that had caught them in their beds, and stood right back up again. With all their wrenching loss and bereavement, they still bowed to each other as they met, and smiled as they traded experiences and advice. Even in the first terrible hours, as transport systems failed and victims struggled to escape, there was no mass panic or lawlessness, and a few incidents apart, police reported no looting or theft. Later investigations revealed that some structures had failed because they had been built in breach of codes or with corners cut for financial gain, but those are crimes of a different kind. In Kobe in 1995, the ordinary Japanese people showed the world who they are, and why they have always prevailed in the face of repeated disaster. Amidst the vast destruction and horror this week has brought, they are showing it again – the same small bows, the same wry smiles and the readiness to accept that now, once again, they have something to do.
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