WHEN KOBE DIED

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Every year on Sept. 1, on the anniversary of the 1923 earthquake that took 143,000 lives in Tokyo and Yokohama, the Japanese observe national Disaster Prevention Day. All over the archipelago, schoolchildren rehearse running through tunnels of smoke with handkerchiefs covering their faces; the military practices helicopter rescues. In countless towns and cities, fire departments roll out their earthquake-simulation machines. These room-size boxes, equipped with a table, two chairs, a bookshelf, a gas cooking stove and a kerosene heater on a wooden floor, are set on shock absorbers and shudder exactly like an earthquake, escalating in force from 3 to 7 on the Japanese version of the Richter scale. The willing victim is supposed to learn the tricks of quake survival: turn off the stove, open the door and hide under the table. Thousands of brave souls take the ride.

The city of Nishinomiya, nine miles outside the port of Kobe, contains many rooms the same size as those simulators. They tend to be in two-story, traditional wooden houses built in the years just after World War II. The roofs of such houses are heavy blue or brown tile. The walls are a thin lattice of light wood finished with stucco. The effect, says Laurence Kornfield, a San Francisco chief building inspector familiar with the style, is ``a lot like putting a heavy book up on top of a frame of pencils.''

At 5:46 a.m. on Tuesday, when a real earthquake, the most deadly since 1923, roared through the Kobe area, something happened to the little rooms that never happens in the simulator machines. Their roofs fell in. By the tens of thousands. Where each house stood, there is now just a brown or blue blanket of tile, settled almost gently over a wreckage of wood, plaster and human bodies.

On Tuesday night in Nishinomiya, Lieut. Tsutomu Fujii and 10 of his men from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were digging away in such a ruin. They toiled through a frigid night lighted only by a full moon, while the daughter of the house stood nearby, sniffing back tears. Eventually they excavated her parents, gently placed their bodies on litters cobbled out of a broken door and a kitchen counter, and loaded them on a truck headed for a makeshift morgue. Lieut. Fujii had dug out seven corpses since morning, turning him into something of an instant expert. ``That couple seems to have got out of bed and made it to the entryway of their house,'' he said. ``Then the whole house fell on them. They didn't stand a chance.'' Then Fujii turned and marched off to the next collapsed home.

By Saturday, probably in excess of 5,000 people had perished in Kobe, more than half of them the elderly, who customarily sleep on the ground floor. The quake injured 25,000; 46,440 buildings lay in ruins; 310,000--one-fifth of the city's population--were at least temporarily homeless. Nearly a million households had no water, 40,000 had no electricity, 849,500 no natural gas-- all the result of an earthquake that struck where no one was prepared to expect it, any more than the simulators had prepared them for its devastation. In the past few months, the Japanese public had grown increasingly nervous about the possibility of a large quake. The country sits at the intersection of four tectonic plates, and from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south, it is almost constantly at seismic risk. Over the past half-year, a series of tremors had rocked the northern and northeastern parts of the archipelago: an 8.1 in October, a 7.5 in December and a 6.9 in January. They were too big, in too rapid succession. An old fear began to reassert itself, centering, naturally, on high-risk Tokyo.

And so last week's quake struck Kobe, which is nowhere near Tokyo, and was supposedly one of the most quake-safe cities in Japan. It is in the country's west, not on the seismically jumpy Central Pacific coast, on a fault far from the main tectonic collision zones. Kobe is not as big as Tokyo, but with 1.5 million inhabitants, it is Japan's second largest port. Its importance was recognized by American commanders, who bombed it 25 times in the final year of World War II, the last time on the day Japan formally announced its surrender. The aerial attacks ruined the city, killing 17,014 people and leaving 530,858 homeless. Last week the quake that Japan had not expected accomplished about a third that much carnage in 20 seconds. ``I was a child when the city was destroyed during the war,'' said Shigemitsu Okino, huddled in a makeshift shelter. ``It looked a lot like this. The difference is, we could hear the planes coming, but the earthquake was silent.''

The fault that ruptured lies about six miles beneath Awaji Island, 15 miles off Kobe's shore. The sides of the fault suddenly shifted against each other, violently lurching a total of 6 to 10 ft. in opposite directions. The result was havoc. Trains flipped on their sides, and at least one train station rolled over, crushing cars in its parking lot. The supposedly indestructible track of the Shinkansen bullet train snapped in eight places. Luckily, the first train of the day had not yet left for Kobe. The city's main highway disintegrated in three places. In the case of the elevated Hanshin Expressway, 15 of the huge reinforced concrete pillars holding up the roadbed broke off at their bases, and a 1,650 ft. stretch of four-lane blacktop tore loose, tipping at a 45 angle, as though it had got tired and leaned over to rest its right lane on the ground. Drivers soared off into midair. ``It was terrifying,'' said Yoshio Fukumoto, who managed to get himself and his passengers out of a bus after its front end had screeched to a halt with the first 6 ft. suspended in space. ``Like watching a scene from a movie.'' And every road, in every part of the city, was lined with flattened houses.

Then came fire: hundreds of separate blazes, some consuming whole neighborhoods, many lighted perhaps by the toppled gas cooking burners of early-morning breakfasters. Fire fighters could not combat the blazes: there was no water in the wrecked city mains. Rescue vehicles failed to come, and wounded people trapped in collapsed and burning houses began to die. As California has learned, an earthquake does not have to be the Big One to be hell. Said Hiroshi Yagi, a computer-company executive: ``I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like the last days of the war.'' At the Nishinomiya sport center, facilities are divided in two. One part, the main gym, now serves as a dormitory for hundreds of families who have lost their homes or fear they will collapse. Because the city's gas supply is designed to cut off automatically at the first tremor of a quake, the gym, like the rest of the city, has no heat; 500 refugees huddle in blankets against the subfreezing weather. Some have salvaged a few belongings, and others have managed to save pets--a tame raccoon squirms in a cage.

Despite their misery, the survivors are quiet and stoical. ``Shoganai,'' they say, it can't be helped. A monumental tragedy had arrived, but it, like so many before it, would pass. Occasionally there is weeping, but there is no hysteria, no yelling, and grief is muted, even private. The adjoining rooms have been turned into temporary morgues, and all night long there is solemn traffic between the room of the living and those of the dead. Survivors enter to identify a relative, then return and lay their own bedding next to the body in order to fulfill otsuya, the Buddhist practice of spending a night with the newly deceased. There were enough hours in the three endless days following the Kobe quake to accommodate mourning, hardship and eventually blame. Occasionally, foreign- seeming figures intruded: soldiers in their khakis, firemen clad in surreal silver. But for the most part, it was a city of refugees. By night people huddled in high schools or town halls, in stairwells or around bonfires. By day they drifted back to the wreckage of their lives. Kazumichi Kawabata, 45 and grieving, searched brokenly through the remains of his house. He was looking for his driver's license, he noted dully. But ``the most important thing, I can't get. That's the voice of my daughter.''

Living conditions were wretched. In Kobe proper, the acrid smoke from all the fires was so thick that it fogged the air and obscured the Rokko Mountains. Without water there were few functioning toilets and no baths. In many shelters, a day's food consisted of a rice cake. Some trolled for drinking water in polluted brooks. Aftershocks frazzled already shot nerves, and doctors worried about sanitation and what seemed like an incipient flu epidemic.

Tens of thousands of people, appalled at the lack of goods and services, picked up their belongings and set out on foot for Osaka, 19 miles away. Yoko Kawaguchi, 28, dressed in fashionable clothes, pushed her daughter Aya, 14 months, around piles of cement and glass. ``We're going to my sister's house near Osaka,'' she said, pointing to her husband driving ahead of her on a motorcycle loaded with clothing. ``We're worried that our house might not survive another strong quake.'' An elderly man stayed put, sitting in front of his shattered house, holding a flask. ``Everything is gone,'' he said. ``What can you do except sip sake and smile?''

In the foreign press, much was made of the refugees' good behavior. There were no reports of looting, and many shared what little food they had, maintaining civility under trying circumstances. But their stoicism did not preclude a deep discontent.

This was in part almost spiritual in nature. The Japanese, understandably, have always been obsessed with quakes. Once they attributed the tremors to the thrashing of a giant catfish called Namazu. In recent times Japanese have come to believe in the power of science to guard them against the catastrophic thrashing. The nation invested heavily in quake research, quakeproof engineering, quake relief. When Japanese saw the damage done in Los Angeles on Jan. 17, 1994, they smiled to themselves and thought, We would have fared far better. Not only did they believe their seismologists could predict the next Big One, but their leaders gave the impression they would be ready for it when it came. But when the ground shook under Kobe on Jan. 17, 1995, that faith suffered its own Richter shock, and Japanese confidence in their ability to outsmart nature lay in ruins. A vast feeling of insecurity rushed into the vacuum, accompanied by anger.

Longtime emphasis on the threat in Central Pacific Japan had created an atrophy of vigilance in the western part of the country: in Tokyo 27% of homes kept emergency supplies; in Osaka the number had shrunk to 2.6%. While Tokyo's army and civilian officials conducted yearly drills to test their coordination, military officials reluctantly admit that in the Kobe area they did not.

The result was a deadly confusion that seemed to overtake every level of government. Immediately after the quake, Kobe authorities failed to cordon off main roads for official use, and the delay of police and fire vehicles undoubtedly raised the death toll. For nearly four hours, the Governor of Hyogo prefecture, which includes Kobe, neglected to make the necessary request for aid to the national armed forces, which would provide 16,000 rescuers by week's end. The national government could also have stepped in sooner to aid with coordination. Soldiers who did arrive were plagued by communications snafus: at midnight on Tuesday, one field commander was unable to get radio instructions and had to drive to the Nishinomiya city hall for information. In the context of such disarray, some Kobe residents wondered whether their rescuers were dangerously dispirited.

At 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 21 hours after the quake, an army rescue detail halted its rescue prematurely. A seven-story building in a working- class Nishinomiya district had rolled over on its side, reportedly trapping 15 to 20 people within. The soldiers removed two bodies and then stopped digging. Shrugged a young lieutenant: ``We think it's hopeless. No one could have survived by now.''

A few blocks away and half a day later, a fireman shook his head as his unit attacked a crumbled house thought to have five people inside: a young girl, her parents, grandmother and great-grandmother. ``Until about 7 last night,'' a bystander said, ``we could hear the little girl calling okasan, okasan [mother, mother].'' But the fatigued firemen, performing a kind of triage, ignored the dwelling for easier rescues nearby. Now, as they began to dig, the crumpled house was silent. Alone in its rubble stood a large bronze statue of Kannon, a female representation of the Buddha; her name means ``the one who hears cries.''

Yoshio Miyoshi, 34, currently housed at the East Suma elementary school, has had enough of stoicism. ``We're partly to blame because many of us have not prepared for earthquakes,'' he says, shaking his head. ``But everyone here is surprised that we've had so little help. Many had to watch our homes burn down with not a fireman in sight. Then we have to go without food or water because the authorities are so disorganized.''

His complaint, even in a society that shuns direct attack, is finding echoes in high places. Yokohama Mayor Hidenobu Takahide, a former construction-ministry official, says baldly, ``The problem is that the government did not exert leadership.'' In a speech to the Diet, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama pledged that his government would ``waste no time in taking every necessary fiscal and financial measure'' to help rebuild the devastated area. But when he suggested that the relief effort had faltered because of the quake's unprecedented severity, loud jeers rang out from the opposition benches. It was widely reported that Murayama had learned of the disaster only two hours after it struck. When he toured Kobe, Tokyo papers featured quotes from angry residents, along the lines of ``We don't need Murayama. We need drinking water.'' By the end of the week, welcome food and water shipments finally arrived at the Nishinomiya sports center and other large shelters--enough, in fact, so that authorities claimed everyone was getting two good meals a day. In some neighborhoods, the resumption of running water reduced the prospect of disease. Makers of goods ranging from helicopters to lingerie donated wares (the local yakuza had already turned themselves into neighborhood godfathers by dispensing necessities in their district), and tractors and cranes began working day and night to dig out victims and remove the huge hulk of the collapsed highway.

Housing the homeless remained a problem: between them, local and central governments committed to build just 7,000 new houses, a token gesture. But a government agency offered low-interest loans to homeowners, and several banks extended similar deals to afflicted businesses. Kobe's short-term losses have been estimated at between $33 billion and $80 billion; and it has become apparent that international companies from Ford, which imports engines and transmissions, to European shippers who used Kobe as a transfer point for containers bound for much of the Far East will be slowed down or disrupted.

Still, according to the Daiwa Institute of Research, combined public and private spending on Kobe's reconstruction may reach as high as $50 billion, which it estimates might help add 0.4% to recession-plagued Japan's economic growth for the fiscal year 1995. On Tuesday morning, one hour after the great tremor struck, Takehiko Kano was startled to see men in his neighborhood, where many of the one-family houses were totally destroyed, heading for work. ``They were looking at their watches and wondering why the bus hadn't arrived on time.''

Kazuo Nukazawa, managing director at Keidanren, the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations, feels that the quake's benefits will extend further than that. ``We Japanese learn from the school of experience,'' he says, ``and this will reduce our hubris and complacency. We've been proud of building bridges and roads that were not supposed to collapse, but people now see that there were faults in the buildings and infrastructure. In Tokyo people will now make better preparations for a quake and get over their complacency. We have learned something, and that's what we need to do.''

Nukazawa, however, lives in Tokyo. In Nagata, the Kobe neighborhood most ravaged by fire, two large groups of begrimed fire fighters were using rakes and shovels to comb the charred debris for the remains of more victims. A few yards away, a small middle-aged woman dressed in sweater and pants knelt to the ground. Water was still scarce, so the white chrysanthemums in the jar she held were no doubt drinking part of her personal ration. According to custom, the survivors of someone who has perished in an accident build a small shrine at the place where their loved one died. The woman set the flowers down next to a blackened plank. Then she allowed herself to cry.

--Reported by Edward W. Desmond and Irene M. Kunii/Kobe and Satsuki Oba and Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo

With reporting by EDWARD W. DESMOND AND IRENE M. KUNII/KOBE AND SATSUKI OBA AND HIROKO TASHIRO/TOKYO