Reader Brady Cusick, a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, writes:
I
am doing a dissertation about volunteering following
the Kobe earthquake and did fieldwork last year in
Kobe and Osaka. Sean Kinsell was right about many
things but I would add a few things. Along with thick
tile roofs and wood walls, typical Japanese houses are
not built on foundations so they are even more
susceptible to earthquakes. Also, many urban Japanese
live in large concrete apartment complexes (dubbed,
ironically enough, "mansions") rather than houses.
These complexes, especially those built in the '50s,
'60s, and '70s, are poorly made and floors are liable
to collapse on each other in a strong earthquake.
Government planning was of course terrible,
particularly because nobody expected that the next big
quake would happen in Kobe. Also, it was
centrally-planned from Tokyo and they moved extremely
slowly. Strangely, in a country prone to earthquakes,
they have very little in the way of disaster relief
planning. They don't even have the equivalent of
FEMA. The government also initially rejected any
outside help, such as from the International Red Cross
or American military stationed in Japan, because the
bureaucrats thought they could control everything.
Outside of the government, there were no local
institutions or national NGOs that were qualified or
experienced enough to help coordinate the disaster
relief. Over a million people volunteered, which was
remarkable in a country that lacks a history of
voluntarism, but it was extremely difficult to
effectively use these volunteers without proper
coordination.
Here's a 1998 Reason piece on the aftermath of the Kobe quake. I commissioned it after the LAT ran early stories on the problems of reconstruction but didn't follow up. I wanted to know what happened, and one great thing about being a magazine editor is that you can assign people to find that sort of thing out. Here's a Gary Becker column on a more positive assessment by George Horwich of Purdue University (citation: George Horwich, "Economic Lessons of the Kobe Earthquake," Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 48, no. 3 (2000), pp. 521-542.).
|
