In the wake of Haiti, remembering the 1995 Kobe earthquake

A commemoration of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. (Image via Wikipedia)

Fifteen years ago, on the evening of January 17, 1995, an earthquake devastated my hometown of Kobe, Japan.

My older brother George and I were hanging out at the apartment we shared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was around 8 p.m. We were bushed from our jobs, George’s as a bond broker and mine as an editor at a financial magazine.

George heard about it through his work, which involved selling U.S. securities to Japanese banks. We immediately called home, though it was before 6 a.m. The quake had hit at 5:46.

Dad answered. “We’re okay,” he said. “It wasn’t so bad. We’re fine.” He sounded shaken but otherwise unhurt. We’d learn later the quake’s strange path had spared our house, though it wiped out others along the same street. My folks lived in a totally altered world, but they didn’t know it yet. We talked a few more moments, then clicked off. Moments later, the phone lines went down. We wouldn’t get through again for days.

We watched in horror as the news showed images of our beloved city reduced to ruins. Kobe hugs a wedge between mountain range and sea, and is considered cosmopolitan and scenic. The city we saw on TV looked like a war zone. Piles and piles of broken cement; people bleeding and crying in the streets; the elevated highway pancaked, slammed as if by a giant fist.

A young man in a puffy parka stood atop the crumbly pile that used to be his home. “Okaasan,” he called, into the pile. Mother. “Okaasan.”

As I watch the horror in Haiti, all this comes creeping back. The quake magnitude in Kobe hit 6.8; in Haiti, it was 7.0. The final death toll in Kobe was 6,434 — and that was in the second-richest nation in the world. In Haiti, the Red Cross estimates 50,000.

I can only imagine the panic and frustration Haitian-Americans must feel as they watch pictures of their crushed country on TV. If we fretted back then about slow Japanese bureaucracy, Haitians must rage at their own shattered government. When natural disaster hits home, the impotence is a second trauma for immigrants.