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Shaky recovery - earthquake striken Kobe, Japan
Reason, Jan, 1998 by Michael J. Oakes
Three years after a devastating earthquake, Kobe is still in ruins. Why can't Japan cope with disasters?
On January 17, 1995, an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale rocked the port city of Kobe, Japan. The quake, which came almost exactly a year after one of a similar magnitude in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge, dominated the news with the images of ruin and desperation that inevitably follow such a disaster: displaced residents mourning the dead and worrying over the missing; elevated highways turned perpendicular to the ground; buildings reduced to rubble. The toll of the Kobe earthquake was stunning: 6,400 dead, $100 billion in damage.
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Confusion and disruption are the rule in an earthquake and its aftermath. This is to be expected when solid earth turns to shifting mass, when streets split open and buildings fall under their own weight. But such a crisis tests far more than the faith of victims and the integrity of existing structures. It also tests the limits of how social, political, and economic systems - and the people operating within those systems - adapt, recover, and rebound from dramatically changed circumstances. An earthquake is a special case, one that brings to light usually subterranean organizing principles even as it brings down buildings and roadways. In this sense, the story of how Kobe responded (and continues to respond) to the quake is about much more than a city righting itself after a natural disaster. It is about how underlying rules and customs either facilitate or retard not just recovery from a natural disaster, but the ability to adapt and develop over time.
This is, then, a frustrating story. It is one that raises serious questions about Japan's much-vaunted devotion to top-down order and stability and its implementation of a "plan-rational" at almost every level of society. Over the past two decades and as the first of the great Asian tigers, Japan has been hailed for the success of its "administrative guidance," its ability to implement elite economic planning that somehow managed to steer clear both of the "excesses" of unbridled capitalism and the poverty of a command economy. As its economy went into recession in the '90s, enthusiasm for Japanese-style economic management and planning understandably waned. A close look at the Kobe earthquake and the city's slow recovery efforts suggests reasons for the larger problems in Japan's economy.
The disaster in Kobe reveals a set of guiding principles that not only hampered rescue efforts but even contributed to the quake's damage. Indeed, those policies have helped ensure that more than 27,000 families are still living and working in temporary buildings three years after the disaster - despite Japan's wealth. By substituting bureaucratic regularity for entrepreneurial innovation, government dictates for market processes, and vague group ownership for clear-cut property rights, the status quo in Japan has helped make the rebuilding of Kobe immeasurably more difficult than it needs to be.
Such problems became evident as soon as the earth stopped shaking. A post-quake report issued by the Kobe YMCA is filled with anecdotes such as this one: Three days after the quake, two women from Kobe Citizens Central Hospital appeared at city hall asking for 10 volunteers to help carry water at the hospital, located about a mile away. Water duty, they explained to city workers, pulled too many skilled nurses from more-urgent medical tasks. Officials on the first floor of city hall turned the women away. Yet on the eighth floor of the same building was a list of 5,000 registered volunteers willing to help any way they could. When the women came back for more help, officials told them to return later with a written request.
Similar bureaucratic procedures beset rescue and recovery efforts at the national level as well. Officials turned away doctors from the United States because they were not certified to practice medicine in Japan. They quarantined European search dogs while Kobe residents picked through the rubble by hand. Even offers of help from within Japan were refused: Although a disabled phone system presented a critical problem to search-and-rescue efforts, officials refused to distribute cellular phones donated by Nippon Motorola because they didn't want to issue the required telephone identification numbers. Officials initially rejected an early offer of medical help from the Japanese Association of Acute Medicine because they were unfamiliar with that organization; they changed their minds a week later as a flu virus raged through evacuation shelters.
The director of Kobe's international affairs division, Kiyoyuki Kanemitsu, exemplifies the distaste many officials show for stepping out of their regulated routine. When asked about the frequently hostile attitude toward volunteers wanting to assist rescue and emergency care operations, Kanemitsu explains, "In order to coordinate [the volunteers] it would take a lot of time, and we needed a bigger picture of the total damage. Also, we didn't know much about the people who volunteered. Frankly, we couldn't verify the trustworthiness of the people who volunteered, so we could not take responsibility for them."
