Anxious For News From Home

Hiroshi Takaoka waited in Spokane on Tuesday for word about the safety of his daughter in the earthquake-damaged city of Kobe, Japan. Takaoka is executive vice president of Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute in northwest Spokane and one of many people eager to learn more about casualties and damage inside the earthquake zone.

Mukogawa Institute is a U.S. extension of Mukogawa Women’s University just outside Nishinomiya, Japan. Nishinomiya became a sister city of Spokane in 1962.

As of Tuesday afternoon, about 300 people had been reported killed in Nishinomiya, which is 15 miles east of Kobe and 15 miles southeast of Osaka. Nishinomiya has a population of about 400,000 people.

Takaoka still hadn’t talked with Mukogawa officials because telephone lines are down over a broad area, he said.

“It has not been possible to make contact.”

Three Spokane teachers in Nishinomiya were not harmed, but they have been forced to stay with friends because the apartment building where they live has been declared unfit for occupancy.

Spokane School District personnel assistant Gordon Elmes identified the three as Amanda Wood, Stephanie Armijo and Joan Frank. They are on leave teaching English in Nishinomiya junior high schools.

Elmes said he did a similar tour of duty for the 1990-1991 school year, and lived in the same apartment building.

The stucco, five-story structure is about a mile from the center of Nishinomiya, he said, estimating its age at eight or nine years.

Elmes said there were frequent tremors while he lived in the city, but none that bothered the Japanese.

“They just took it in stride,” he said. “We felt quite safe except for the night a severe typhoon went through there.”

Watching the television footage from Kobe, Elmes said he saw the wreckage of trains he used to ride. He recognized a downtown square and its department stores.

“That looked pretty bad,” Elmes said.

Elmes said he and district Superintendent Gary Livingston called relatives of the teachers Tuesday morning to find out if there had been any contact since the quake.

Only L.C. and Sandra Molett, Armijo’s family, had any messages.

L.C. Molett said Sandra took the call, and reported that Armijo sounded shaken.

Molett, who was home for the Christmas holidays, teaches English and Spanish at Rogers High School. Wood teaches English at North Central, and Frank teaches at Stevens Elementary School.

Hank Reiman of Spokane just returned from spending the holidays in Japan, where his wife, Marilyn, is on a Washington State University contract in Nishinomiya to teach English.

“When I first saw the news I just got an empty feeling,” Reiman said.

He arrived home from work late Monday to find a message from his wife on their answering machine, saying that she was all right.

“She said basically everything in her apartment was knocked over,” Reiman said. “She said the devastation was unreal. She said there were several fires burning.”

Marilyn Reiman was evacuated to a sports complex near her apartment building, he said.

A group of 197 high-school-age girls is expected to arrive in Spokane next Wednesday for Mukogawa’s English language program. Each group spends four months studying English and American culture.

About 50 of those students live in the earthquake zone, and it is not known whether all of them will be able to come to Spokane, Takaoka said.

At Eastern Washington University, students from Japan gathered in a conference room Tuesday to view videotaped news reports of the devastation.

Chieko Kamiya, who is enrolled in the English Language Institute at EWU, was worried about her cousin in the Kobe area. So far, there has been no word.

EWU is home to more than 70 students from Japan, many of them enrolled in the Asia University in America Program.

“They are desperate for information about what happened,” said Megan Mulvaney, Asia University program director.

Shin Yamaguchi, of Kobe, a junior in radio and television broadcasting, was able to talk by telephone Monday and Tuesday to his father, Hideru Yamaguchi. Their home was damaged in the earthquake, but no one was hurt, he said.

Two earthquake relief funds have been established at First Interstate Bank:

Gov. Mike Lowry announced a Kobe Earthquake Fund to help people in that city.

An earthquake relief fund in care of the Spokane Sister Cities Association also is set up at First Interstate. Money from that fund will go to help people in Nishinomiya, said Joel Moore, former president of the association.

People may contribute by mailing or dropping off donations to any First Interstate branch.

MEMO: This is a sidebar which appeared with story: Hotline U.S. government hotline number for inquiring about friends or relatives in Japan: (202) 647-0900. To find out about U.S. military personnel in Japan: (703) 697-5737.

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Mike Prager and Bert Caldwell Staff writers Staff writer Gita Sitaramiah contributed to this report.