PICKING UP THE PIECES

By JAMES WALSH

The heavens wept last week for Kobe. A downpour that drenched western Japan shadowed forth the cumulative grief of a city awash in death and wreckage. Then, as the industrial hub stirred slowly, painfully back to life, the stock market wept for Kobe. On the blackest trading day in nearly 312 years, the Tokyo exchange's Nikkei index shed 1,054 points, or 5.6% of value, as investors began to size up the blow Japan had suffered. A shudder of the earth that lasted barely 20 seconds in the foredawn of Jan. 17 had dealt upheaval far beyond the human dimension of nearly 5,090 dead and 300,000 made homeless. Among the army of building crews that moved in to occupy Kobe last week, a Tobishima Corp. construction supervisor surveyed the ruins and judged, ``This city is going to take 10 years to rebuild.''

Whatever it takes, the job will be enormous. Not only did Japan's deadliest earthquake in a half-century devastate its most modern port, but reconstruction might sop up as much as $400 billion, at present about 10% of the country's gnp. That repair estimate, which helped trigger the Tokyo Stock Exchange's sell-off, could be swollen. Even so, an immense amount of money that would have been spent or invested in other ways is now required simply to put Kobe right. In the understatement of the week, chief Cabinet Secretary Kozo Igarashi conceded, ``Our initial grasp of the extent of the disaster was insufficient.''

Igarashi was trying to explain why the government had seemed to sleepwalk its way toward extending rescue and relief lifelines in the quake's immediate aftermath. The cost of this sluggish response remains unknowable, but surely many people expired from injuries on the first day, before rescuers got organized and the army arrived in significant numbers. Critics last week were breathing fire on Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's administration for gross ineptitude: unpreparedness, bureaucratic bungling and such follies as, according to the daily Asahi Shimbun, ordering trained sniffer dogs from Switzerland to undergo quarantine.

The resources of the U.S. military establishment in Japan also went mostly untapped, although they were urgently offered. As Japan struggled to cope with its heaviest burden of refugees since World War II, emergency teams of doctors from France and the U.S. arrived to warnings that they could not practice medicine without Japanese licenses. Eleven lawmakers in the opposition New Frontier Party called on Murayama to resign, reflecting widespread public recriminations. In a letter to the daily Yomiuri, college lecturer Junko Murakami charged, ``There are many people in the center of politics and bureaucracy who may be capable of scoring high marks on exams but have no ability to make judgments.''

Misjudgment of the disaster also applied to some early economic calculations. As the losses were reckoned more carefully, they proved to be spectacular. Aside from shattering Kobe's port facilities, which have served as a gateway for 10.6% of Japan's overseas trade, the quake destroyed more than 70,000 buildings and inflicted incalculable havoc on roads, water and power lines and other vital utilities. By one estimate, the rubble was extensive enough to fill 10 times the volume of the huge Tokyo Dome baseball stadium.

Kobe, along with its sister city Osaka, lies astride a narrow coastal strip hemmed in by mountains and the sea, a corridor traversed by Japan's most important roads and rail lines. As a crowning blow, the destruction severed this east-west axis of the industrial belt between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Said U.S. earthquake engineer Charles Scawthorn, a frequent visitor to Japan: ``This is the worst place in the country to have an earthquake. Even Tokyo would not have been such a choke point.''

Battalions of machines moved at a furious pace last week to punch holes through that arterial blockage, allowing Kobe to start breathing freely again. Still, the victims so recently content in their seemingly sturdy metropolis were hard pressed to count their blessings. With nearly 27,000 injured and a death toll approaching 5,100, tragedy continued to exert claims on the emotions of survivors. Together with the political fallout, widely varying cost estimates settled on the scene like so much dust from hydraulic hammering at the ruins. Said shoe salesman Tetsuo Ogawa: ``People will start to rebuild soon, but the damage is so awful that they don't know where to start. It's as if they've been tied up in knots.''

By early last week helicopters bypassing traffic bottlenecks on the ground had managed to ferry in enough food as well as other supplies to sustain the 300,000-plus evacuees still huddled in refuges, mostly tent colonies, schools and government buildings. Amid a host of threats to public hygiene, only a few hundred cases of flu cropped up. Water trucks roamed the city, filling up buckets and jugs, and relief workers deployed chemical toilets. Some 842,000 households remained without gas, however, and about 618,000 still had no water. A refrain among Kobe's survivors was how much they longed for a good, hot scrubdown.

As much as anything, that was a welcome sign of hope reborn. The iron self-control of Japanese stoicism had appeared stretched to the breaking point a few days earlier. Now a glimmer of excitement at the challenge ahead began to spread through the city. At Egeyama Elementary School, where halls and classrooms were lined with futons and makeshift shelters covered the grounds, children dashed around the yard reveling in their strange freedom. Said 9-year-old Aki Inoguchi: ``I'd like to go home soon, but it's my first time living in a tent. It's great fun.''

Nearby, taxi driver Tsuginobu Kai recounted how fires had taken the lives of his father and brother, besides burning down his apartment and his employer's headquarters. For all that, the chubby 55-year-old managed to summon an upbeat outlook. ``I don't know what I'm going to do,'' he said, ``but I'd better think of something quick, because I've got six children. My family and I will go with the flow and cope like everyone else. I'm quite lucky, really, because my wife is very tough.'' He pointed with a laugh to Mrs. Kai, charging around the yard in pursuit of one of their offspring: ``She wears the boots around here.''

Such optimism remained limited, for Kobe simply will not be able to pull itself up by the bootstraps easily. The city is so important to Japanese commerce that authorities almost certainly will make heroic efforts to restore dockyards, highways and railways as soon as possible. The central government will furnish up to 90% of the money needed to repair the public infrastructure, and big companies like Toyota and Matushita Electric, some of whose local operations were knocked out briefly by the quake, were recovering quickly. But relatively few small businesses and homeowners were covered by earthquake insurance. The shock to many of them may be permanent.

A case in point is Nagata, an older working-class district that was swept by a conflagration. Nagata's numerous small factories housed nearly 70% of Japan's shoe industry, which may not rise again. Yasunori Noma, 72, picked methodically through piles of bricks and fire-blackened equipment in search of salvageable machined tubing. Noma's one-man operation had supplied makers of car components. Without insurance, he faces total loss. ``I was thinking about retiring, but now I'll have to work,'' he remarked while putting a piece of steel tubing in a bag. He did not have much faith in government ministries: ``We'll have to see how much help they give someone like me. I certainly can't rebuild on my own.''

Another imponderable is how long it will take to restore Kobe's housing. Some 55,000 apartments and houses were wrecked. Although the government immediately began erecting 18,600 prefabricated units in school yards, construction will fall well short of present needs. Only 3% of all households in Hyogo prefecture, which includes Kobe, were covered by earthquake insurance. Even people who can afford to build a new home are likely to be stymied at first by a moratorium on postquake construction, a policy intended to avert slapdash projects and allow time for possible new building-code and zoning strictures. In Kobe's case, officials were thinking about extending the normal two-month delay to as long as half a year.

Such realizations punctured some of the early forecasts of a silver lining in Kobe's tragedy. Even as heavily hit manufacturers like Kobe Steel had to absorb further jolts on the stock market, construction-industry issues were hot prospects on the Tokyo exchange. After the Nikkei index's steep dip early last week, bidding on these shares helped the exchange recover 318 points by the close of trading on Friday. But the boomlet of hope in the ashes was not enough to convince more sober heads.

The magnitude of Kobe's damage will surely divert large amounts of money from other Japanese projects. Said Mark Brown, a construction-industry analyst for BZW Securities in Tokyo: ``Big damage doesn't necessarily mean good news for construction companies. It's certainly no cause for dancing in the streets.'' In the U.S., a letter writer to the New York Times expressed the same skepticism. Economics professor Thomas Martin wrote, ``If we accept this fallacy, we should also expect to see bombing campaigns included in the next fiscal-stimulus package.'' A rebuilding project that will not want for money is Kobe's crippled seaport. By far the most modern dockyard complex in Japan, it normally handles about 30% of all the country's container shipping. Last week only 27 of 191 berths remained in working order, none of them slips for container carriers. Finished just two years ago, the facilities on the artificial island of Rokko suffered collapse of the subsoil. The 7.2-magnitude seism had in effect turned the harbor landfill to jelly. The unsettled earth sideslipped violently and became waterlogged as the sea penetrated it.

What had been a bustling anchorage for container ships tended by towering cranes on rails turned in a moment into a deflated souffle. Much of the ground fell by a meter, judging by one grating that hung skewered atop a drain pipe high above the sunken surface. Worst of all, the groundslip destroyed the thick concrete perimeter wall, which rolled 45 and burst open a gap into the freight yards. Dozens of tractor-trailer trucks and shipping containers slid into the sea-washed breach. Behind the quay wall, strains tore apart the rails carrying dozens of four-legged cranes, behemoths that cost $10 million apiece. Some toppled over, and others were on their way.

The quake had clearly wrought damage on a grand scale to a port that handled 2.7 million containers last year, including 31% of all exports to the U.S. While shipping lines rerouted their cargo via other ports, Kobe-area manufacturers of products from steel to flat-panel computer displays studied ways to get their goods on the road. Commented Yasuo Iwamoto, marketing chief for the Kobe Port Authority: ``The fact is that Kobe was the container center for Japan. In the long term, I doubt that other ports can take the load we divert to them.''

Full repairs of the port seemed likely to consume on the order of $9 billion and take up to two years. If it all began to look like some colossal punishment, Muammar Gaddafi was not above gloating. Terming the catastrophe ``God's revenge,'' the isolated Libyan leader declared, ``We were expecting it, and we prayed to God to do this to Japan,'' a country that he said ``always rushes to serve the devilish interests of the U.S.''

The Japanese will not soon forgive such ghoulishness. By the same token, many of them found it hard to forgive some of the official incompetence at home that aggravated miseries. Along with all the supposedly quake-proof highway piers and rail lines that crumbled, a combination of traffic jams and chain-of-command snafus prevented troops from arriving at the disaster zone within any reasonable time. So shame-stricken was Lieut. General Yusuke Matsushima, the army commander for central Japan, that he brushed tears from his eyes late last week during a public apology: ``People said, `Why didn't you help us sooner? Why weren't you there?' I understand, but it was--the situation.''

Offers of aid had poured in from 60 countries, as well as three U.N. organizations and the European Union. Germany had volunteered engineers, China seismologists, Israel highly trained rescue teams. The Japanese government kept most of them hanging. Press reports embarrassed Tokyo into removing silly restrictions on the Swiss sniffer dogs and the U.S. and French doctors. But Japan's rigid decision-making system seemed to have suffered at least as much breakdown as elevated highways. Kazutoshi Ito, chief of the National Land Agency's disaster division, insisted to foreign journalists that foisting aid on local governments would have smacked of ``a return to prewar militarism.'' At one point he exploded, ``What are you laughing at? Get out of here!''

Although Kobe will weep for some time yet, the Japanese economy as a whole remains solid. What the country will need to address is ways of keeping further natural shocks from reducing another one of its urban jewels to the semblance of postapocalypse disorder. To the extent that lives and civility were preserved, the credit belongs mostly to Kobe's citizens, who pitched in to dig their relatives and neighbors out of the rubble. Remarked Ichizo Kubo, the 74-year-old owner of a building-supply shop: ``Now people seem calmer, and smiles are gradually returning. They have shared the experience of the quake and seem ready to work together.'' Japan's greatest natural resource was showing the right stuff once again. Reported by Edward W. Desmond and Satsuki Oba/Kobe

BOX

THE PROBLEMS AND THE PLANS

UTILITIES: Full electricity restored last week, and telephone service to be reconnected to all surviving buildings by Feb. 1. Water supply still out for 618,400 of Hyogo prefecture's 1.36 million households, which should take two to three weeks to rectify. Gas cut off in more than half of Hyogo, with complete restoration at least six weeks away. TRAINS: Full service back on Hankyu's main Takarazuka and Kyoto lines, but up to six months for repairs is required for its third main line to Kobe. The Shinkansen (bullet train) between Osaka and Himeji and the JR Kobe line from Ashiya to Suma need four or five months of reconstruction.

HIGHWAYS: The two main roads from Osaka to Kobe are open, but the Hanshin Expressway remains closed. So far, 139 km of the 200-km roadway have been designated safe, with 36 km more ready in three to four months. 25 km of the most damaged portions may not be open for three years.

PORTS: Kobe's main ports, Rokko Island and Port Island, need $9.4 billion and two years' work to undo all damage. Partial service is expected in four months.

With reporting by EDWARD W. DESMOND AND SATSUKI OBA/KOBE