Quake Victims Help One Another Handle Tragedy

When the earth heaved and threw her to the ground, when the second floor of her wooden home collapsed on top of her, Michiko Nagare was sure she was going to die.

“I thought I had no hope,” said Nagare, 64, her frail body swathed in blankets and her broken right arm bandaged in a sling as she camped out in the lobby of the Nishinomiya Municipal Hospital, about 9 miles from Osaka in western Japan.

Nagare lay buried under rubble for four hours before neighbors could dig her out. The cold bit through her. Whenever she felt faint, her children, who had rushed to the scene, yelled words of encouragement: “You’re OK! Hang in there!”

She did. And along with her husband she survived one of the most devastating earthquakes in this region’s history. At last count, the temblor had killed more than 2,000 people nationwide, left thousands more injured and homeless, snapped roads and train lines and destroyed countless homes.

It also left scores of people shellshocked and completely unprepared for an earthquake occurring in one area of Japan many here say they long regarded as safe.

“There really have been no earthquakes here. Maybe Hokkaido or Tokyo, but not this Kansai area,” said Kumiko Yamamoto, 41, who evacuated to the Nishinomiya city central gymnasium along with her family of three and 1,200 others.

“We weren’t prepared at all. It was as if a bomb had suddenly dropped,” she said. “We thought it was the end. I was so frightened I can’t even describe it.”

As night fell on this middle-class residential area, one of those hardest hit by the quake, the wounded continued to stream into the evacuation center. In one separate room, the living held vigil over the dying. Family and friends hunched over prone bodies, stroking their loved ones’ cheeks, murmuring endearments and wiping away their own tears. Incense burned in one corner for the 144 dead whose corpses lined the room.

Throughout the city, doctors and other emergency workers were hampered by a cutoff of water, gas and phone lines. At the Nishinomiya Municipal Hospital, the absence of water prevented doctors from performing all surgeries and even taking X-rays.

Women needing Caesarian sections were turned away. So was a stretcher carrying the tiny corpses of two children, their mother collapsed over them in grief, clutching a doll.

Most of the 600 quake victims who managed to make it here were given little more than a bandage and ointment, a roof over their heads and a small bite to eat.

“Fortunately, we haven’t gotten many injuries that require major surgery,” said Sadao Noguchi, Nishinomiya doctor. “We were expecting more intestinal injuries, but it seems either people were killed or they got only slight injuries.”