EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS CONT'D
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.).