1995 Kobe Earthquake: The Great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster in Japan

The Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, usually called the Kobe earthquake, struck western Japan at 5:46 a.m. on 17 January 1995. In about 20 seconds of violent shaking it killed 6,434 people, flattened tens of thousands of homes, toppled a long section of elevated expressway and wrecked one of the world’s busiest ports. It was Japan’s deadliest earthquake since 1923 and it exposed serious weaknesses in the country’s disaster preparedness.

The earthquake

The rupture began beneath the Akashi Strait near the northern tip of Awaji Island, about 20 km from central Kobe, at a depth of roughly 16 km. It spread along the Nojima Fault on Awaji and along faults running under Kobe and the neighbouring cities. The Japan Meteorological Agency rated it 7.3 on its magnitude scale; seismologists give a moment magnitude of about 6.9.

Because the fault ran directly beneath a dense urban area, the shaking reached the top level of the Japanese intensity scale in a narrow belt through Kobe, Ashiya and Nishinomiya. The Kansai region had not suffered a destructive earthquake in living memory, and many residents believed it was relatively safe compared with the Tokyo area.

Destruction

Most victims died within minutes, crushed when traditional wooden houses with heavy clay-tiled roofs collapsed while people slept. Older buildings constructed before Japan’s 1981 seismic code suffered far worse than newer ones. In all, about 105,000 buildings were completely destroyed and roughly 145,000 partly destroyed.

Fires broke out at around 300 locations, fed by broken gas pipes. With water mains shattered and roads blocked, firefighters could do little, and whole neighbourhoods burned, especially in Nagata Ward with its closely packed houses and small workshops.

The most famous image of the disaster was the elevated Hanshin Expressway lying on its side in Higashinada Ward, where a section about 635 metres long had toppled over. Bullet-train viaducts of the Sanyo Shinkansen also failed. The Port of Kobe, then one of the busiest container ports in the world, lost most of its quays as reclaimed land liquefied and slumped into the sea.

A slow response

The authorities were badly prepared. Communications were cut, and officials in Tokyo did not grasp the scale of the disaster for hours. Under the rules of the time, the Self-Defense Forces needed a request from the prefectural governor before deploying in force, and large numbers of troops arrived only later in the day.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s government faced strong criticism, as did delays in accepting foreign offers of help such as rescue dogs and medical teams. At the peak more than 300,000 people were living in schools, gyms and other evacuation shelters in the winter cold.

The volunteer movement

Where the state was slow, citizens stepped in. An estimated 1.3 million volunteers came to the area during the following year, many of them students who had never before taken part in organised civic action. The Japanese press called 1995 the “first year of volunteerism”.

The experience led to the Law to Promote Specified Non-profit Activities of 1998, which made it easier to set up non-profit organisations in Japan. It also changed how later disasters were handled, with volunteer centres now a standard part of the response.

Recovery and lessons

The economic losses were estimated at about 10 trillion yen, roughly 100 billion US dollars at the time, making it one of the costliest natural disasters on record. The expressway, railways and port were rebuilt within a few years, but Kobe’s port never regained its former international ranking and many small businesses in the poorer districts did not survive.

Japan reformed its crisis management, gave the prime minister’s office a stronger role, made military deployment easier and invested heavily in seismic monitoring and the retrofitting of older buildings and bridges. In 1995 the government designated 17 January as Disaster Prevention and Volunteer Day.

Kobe also built places of remembrance. The Kobe Luminarie, an illuminated arcade of lights first held in December 1995, became an annual winter event, and a museum and research centre on the waterfront, the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution, opened in 2002 to preserve the memory of the disaster and train officials.

Timeline

• 1995, 17 January, 5:46 a.m.: The earthquake strikes the Hanshin region and Awaji Island.
• 1995, 17 January: Fires spread through Nagata Ward and other parts of Kobe.
• 1995, 17-18 January: Self-Defense Forces units deploy to the disaster area.
• 1995, late January: More than 300,000 people are living in evacuation shelters.
• 1995, 8 April: The Sanyo Shinkansen line through Kobe reopens.
• 1995, December: The first Kobe Luminarie light festival is held in memory of the victims.
• 1996, 30 September: The rebuilt Hanshin Expressway Kobe route fully reopens.
• 1998: The Non-profit Organisation Law is passed.

Why it matters

The Kobe earthquake struck exactly one year after the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles and showed that a modern, wealthy country could still be overwhelmed by a quake beneath a city. It was Japan’s worst since the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, and the reforms it inspired shaped Japan’s response to later disasters, including the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011.