Coping with Disaster: Lessons Learned in Japan

My sister was living in Japan when the Great Hanshin Earthquake struck in early 1995. I have a letter from her talking about earthquakes, begun two days before the event. It was as if she had some premonition of it. She was close enough to be knocked out of bed by her shaking building, but her town was physically unscathed by the huge 'quake.

I left for Japan later that year, after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, after the Sarin gas attacks in a Tokyo subway, and after the hijack of a Japanese domestic passenger plane. Friends urged me not to go, but I refuse to let terrorists rule my life. I went to Germany a few weeks after Turkish houses were burned down by Neo-Nazis, but I was not going to let racists keep me out of the country - that was what they wanted. I believe that as soon as we let fear rule our lives, we have let the oppressors win. In Germany I made many German friends who clearly had nothing to do with the Neo-Nazi sentiments that the Australian media had presented to us back home. So I went to Japan in July 1995.

The memory of the earthquake was still very fresh in the minds of the Japanese people. The earthquake had devastated Kobe. Over 5000 people died as a result of it. Many could have been saved with better planning and engineering.

Those who have never been to Japan tend to have the view that it is a very technologically advanced country, and assume that living conditions are just as advanced. We see bizarre high-tech images of capsule hotels and space-age architecture on television and in magazines. The truth is that even Tokyo is really predominantly filled with very old, often wooden buildings, and that city plans often follow the rather organic and disorderly patterns of the medieval cities they have grown from. Of course this adds to the charm of Japan: the wonderful blend of high-rise modern structures dotted with very old-style buildings in between, and the lovely little alleyways that form a labyrinth of hidden surprises: shops, restaurants, temples, shrines and gardens. Sadly, however, it is the maze of narrow alleys and the predominance of wooden houses and apartment buildings that led to the death of thousands of people in Kobe in Hyogo Prefecture.

After buildings and bridges collapsed when the earthquake itself struck, a huge number of fires started in the area. This is hardly surprising when one considers that it was the middle of winter and Japanese nearly always heat their homes with oil heaters. The Japanese still have very little insulation in their buildings, and that central heating is almost unheard of in residential apartments and even in schools. The tragedy in Kobe was that many of these fires could not be managed because alleys were too narrow for fire trucks to get through.

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