Word: kobe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...aftershocks are not always physical, the damage not always measured in coffins and cracked pillars. Just as the port city of Kobe stirred painfully back to life last week from the quake that killed more than 5,000 people and left 300,000 homeless, a psychological temblor hit the Tokyo exchange. On the blackest trading day in nearly four years, the Tokyo exchange's Nikkei average shed 1,054 points, or 5.6% of value, as investors began to size up the blow Japan had suffered. Among the army of construction crews that moved in to occupy Kobe last week...
...whole got such a serious jolt. One of Japan's most important industrial and transportation centers had been shattered in the 20 seconds the quake lasted. Aside from the destruction of its port facilities, which served as a gateway for about 10% of Japan's overseas trade, Kobe's trains, its elevated highways and much of its basic utilities lay in ruins...
...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...