By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

She was sitting in the rubble of earthquake-ravaged Kobe, weeping softly, when photographer Yoichi Kume found her. He captured the scene on film, but chose not to intrude on the woman's grief to ask her name. The photo appeared on the cover of last week's Time and was transmitted to newspapers around the world by Reuter--one of the most poignant images of Japan's worst natural disaster in a half-century.

Who was the woman? Ryoji Tachio, a reporter for the daily Tokyo Shimbun, was curious. Armed only with the photo, he set out last week in Kobe to find her. After hours of scouring shelters for the homeless and asking passersby, he came upon a center for the elderly in the working-class district of Nagata. There he saw a slim woman pouring tea for quake victims. She looked older than in the photo, but when Tachio showed her the picture, she recognized herself by the striped pajama trousers and black-and-white jacket she had been wearing when the photo was taken. The woman, Emiko Deguchi, 47, a department-store salesclerk, agreed to tell Tachio her story.

She was asleep in the two-story wooden house in Nagata that she shared with her mother Yoshie and father Shinichi, both 81, when the quake hit. Emiko and her father were unhurt, but a heavy wardrobe had fallen on Yoshie, pinning the frail old woman to the floor. As fire began roaring through the neighborhood, father and daughter struggled frantically to free her, without success. ``I'm going to stay here,'' her father said, but Emiko pleaded, ``You can't, father. You must live, for mother's sake!'' Emiko pulled him out of the house seconds before it was engulfed in flames. The photograph was taken the following day, when Emiko returned to sift through the ashes for fragments of bone, all that was left of her mother's body.

Emiko and her father have since stayed at the center for the elderly, helping others displaced by the quake. The Tokyo Shimbun hopes to give them the money it earns from syndicating the picture. Emiko is not yet ready to return to her job. ``I thought about going someplace else to live,'' she told Tachio, ``but now I know I want to go back to the home I was born and brought up in, no matter how long it takes.'' Every day she visits the site of that house to make offerings of bread, oranges and tea in memory of her mother.