Memory of 17th January 1995

I jumped out when the first shockwave of the Hanshin Awaji Great Earthquake hit our house near Kobe city at 5:46am.

As it was obvious that the area were completely blacked out, I turned my radio on. A female DJ was just announcing “We are experiencing a strong earthquake…” and suddenly she began to cry.

I checked my sister’s bedroom and was relieved that we were all safe. About 5 minutes later my aunt living in Tokyo phoned us and we knew that the centre of the earthquake was near Kobe. This was the only phone call for a week or two because of crowding of phone lines.

Road traffic was smooth on the day of the earthquake. I drove to Osaka to visit my grandmother and surplized that the city was absolutely normal. She was with my father. Oh I was forgetting that he was on a way back to Tokyo where he used to live then. He experienced the earthquake at the station and soon got to my grandmother’s flat.

Then I went back to our home with plenty of foods. The day 1 had past.

The day 2 and the following many days were literally chaostic. Everyone tried to move by their cars, and caused hopeless traffic jam. This slowed down delivery of water and foods. Even worse, sewerage were completely destroyed and public restrooms soon got unhygienic. If it was summer, we would have to tackle serious plague, too.

What was fortunate for us was that the earthquake didn’t damage Osaka too much. Though Osaka was not known as a beautiful city as Kobe was, it had relatively strong economy.

So here were three things: the earthquake was in that early morning, at the very mid of winter, and didn’t damage Osaka too much. I think we were a bit lucky about these three fortunes.

Image courtesy of Kobe117Shinsai.jp, the photo is distributed under CC BY 2.1 JP.