Trauma to Spirit Lingers After Kobe Quake

KOBE, Japan — On Jan. 17, 1995, Taichi Moheikui’s world collapsed. His house was flattened by the Great Hanshin Earthquake, Japan’s worst temblor in 70 years. His rubber factory burned to the ground. And a few months later, while he and his wife were still camping out in a school building, he learned that she had a fatal cancer.

At 89, Moheikui now lives alone in an 8-by-9-foot tatami-mat room in prefabricated barracks for the elderly and disabled made homeless in the disaster. He does his own cooking and washes his clothes in communal facilities outside the temporary shelter. Lately, he has taken to long morning walks and bicycle rides to keep up his health and spirits.

“I feel terribly depressed when I think about my wife, so I have to find other things to do,” Moheikui said. “I’ve lost 15 kilos [33 pounds] since the earthquake, and I can’t seem to gain them back.”

Still, Moheikui is one of the lucky ones: He won a city lottery for a public apartment in a new housing complex for the elderly, and he plans to move there next year.

Two and a half years after the Kobe earthquake, about 34,000 families are still living in temporary shelters. Most are poor, elderly, ill or unemployed, and for them, the dream of settling into their own house or apartment has slipped over the horizon.

Though their physical needs are cared for, some survivors are finding that restoring their spiritual tranquillity and reestablishing the sense of belonging that is so crucial in Japanese society have turned out to be as difficult as finding a permanent home. Solitary deaths among the elderly and alcoholism among unemployed survivors appear to be on the rise.

On the whole, the citizens of Kobe have grappled heroically with a catastrophe whose proportions are still being tallied. According to the latest statistics from Hyogo prefecture, the temblor and ensuing fires killed 6,394 people, injured 40,071, toppled 240,030 buildings, burned down 7,456 houses and caused an estimated $99 billion in damage. The unemployment rate soared from 3.9% to 6.9% after the quake and has not fallen much since.

Today, a walk through Kobe’s Nagata ward neighborhood--which was reduced to cinders, cement foundations and soot-coated surviving buildings--reveals no traces of the devastation. The elevated Hanshin highway, which toppled onto its side in a hideous memorial to Kobe’s tectonic fury, has been rebuilt.

There are gap-toothed plots where buildings have not sprouted. But most sites are crammed with cranes and construction materials or have been paved over as parking lots. In fact, the most telling signs of the disaster are the spanking clean roads, the wide sidewalks, which do not exist in traditional Japanese neighborhoods, and the block after dreary block of shiny-sided prefabricated housing.

“Lots of money has been invested in the ‘hard side,’ the physical infrastructure, and that is mostly rebuilt,” said Kyoko Shimodoi, a writer for Kobe Shimbun, the city’s leading daily newspaper. “But people’s daily lives--the ‘soft side’--is not improving.”

Indeed, “everyone is gloomy,” said the Rev. Hiroshi Kanda, priest of the Takatori Catholic Church, which burned to the ground in the Nagata fire but has become a center for the volunteers who continue to give their time to help rebuild Kobe. “People have lived through all sort of things, but they were in a state of high tension. Now they have returned to normal daily life, but it’s not the life they once had. . . . And so people feel, ‘It’s still not over.’ ”

Moreover, the financial calamity wrought by the quake was not evenly distributed, and, in the third year of reconstruction, social tensions are emerging between the haves and have-nots of Kobe, he said. Those whose houses were unscathed cannot rejoice when their neighbors are homeless; the rich have rebuilt, while those who cannot afford to do so feel jealous.

“Until now, everyone was more or less the same, but now there are big differences in economic status,” Kanda noted. “Right after the quake, everyone pitched in and helped each other, but now there are people who are clearly being left behind as the rest of the city revives, and those people feel worse than ever.”

This is a phenomenon that causes particular social discomfort in Japan, where the income gap between rich and poor is one of the narrowest in the industrialized world and where 90% of the public consider themselves middle class.

Of those still in temporary housing, 56% of those aged 40 to 64 are not employed, according to a recent survey.

“The only way for them to get out of temporary housing is to win the [housing] lottery,” said Koichiro Ichimura, who heads the Hanshin Awaji Community Fund, which has distributed more than $1 million to nonprofit organizations that are helping rebuild the city.

Meanwhile, alcoholism among middle-aged men living alone in temporary shelters is reportedly becoming a serious problem.

All this has sparked fears that the quake could leave Kobe with a permanent underclass, though such worries are not discussed in public, Ichimura said.

One unexpected benefit of the disaster has been a surge in volunteerism and grass-roots activity and a new cohesion between the Japanese and Kobe’s large population of foreigners, activists say.

Kanda’s church, for example, is now home to a radio station that broadcasts in eight languages and has become a link for the previously disparate communities.

Political cohesion, however, has not emerged.

The national government was roundly criticized for its slow and bureaucratic response to the earthquake, which kept the Self-Defense Forces from reaching the scene for four days while victims died in the rubble. The Japanese media have since reported long delays in distribution of aid and money for reconstruction.

“The lesson we learned was that we must not rely on the government,” said Ichimura.

Japan has not yet developed a political consensus on what kind of government compensation is appropriate for victims of the Kobe quake--or of any future disasters. Opposition parties have introduced two competing bills that would give cash awards to those who lost homes or jobs in the quake. But the dominant Liberal Democratic Party has signaled its opposition and is instead interested in some kind of voluntary, cooperative disaster insurance scheme.

“Why should we go back [and compensate] only victims of the Great Hanshin Earthquake when there have been many other terrible disasters in the past?” asked Yuiichi Takamura of the LDP’s political research division. “How could we justify that?”

In many ways, Kobe’s post-quake troubles are a harbinger of the problems that Japan will face as its population ages.

Moheikui’s complex houses 69 people, many of whom are pushing age 90 and have discovered positive aspects to the communal living forced upon them in the temporary shelter, said Yukiko Sakamoto, the “life support advisor” assigned to helping the building’s residents.

The elderly quake survivors share food, advice and companionship, check on neighbors who haven’t been seen visiting the communal toilet, and shop and run errands for friends who are ill.

“In a regular building, when you close the door, you are all alone behind your concrete walls, and you don’t even hear your neighbors,” Sakamoto said. “In the temporary housing units, if the old man who always has his TV on all day doesn’t turn it on, someone will drop by and say: ‘Are you all right? Do you have a headache? Do you want to go to the doctor?’ ”

One octogenarian whose husband died in the shelter turned down an invitation to live with her son, saying she would be too lonely, Sakamoto said. “She said she’d be better off with her friends,” Sakamoto said.

Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.