Word: murayama
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...same time, critics last week were still denouncing Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's management of the disaster for gross incompetence, lack of preparedness and bureaucratic bungling. His government remained reluctant to take help from the outside. Offers poured in from 60 countries, the U.N. and the European Union, but Japan accepted aid from only 15 of them. Tokyo also turned down most offers of help from the U.S. military based in the country, though the American forces have tons of emergency supplies stockpiled and even offered to accommodate refugees aboard an aircraft carrier. Teams of doctors from...
Earthquake Recriminations The Japanese government's torpid response to the Jan. 17 catastrophe in Kobe (5,090 dead, 29 still missing and about 300,000 homeless) has led to intense criticism of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama--even from members of his own Socialist Party. Offers of assistance from 60 countries, the U.N. and the World Health Organization poured in, but some were subjectedto endless bureaucratic wrangling. Examples: foreign doctors were rebuffed at first because they did not have Japanese licenses; Swiss sniffer dogs were threatened with quarantine by the Agriculture Ministry. Conditions in the stricken port city, however, are improving...
...what was once the country's second busiest port, survivors waited stoically in line for hours for a small bottle of water and a fist-size ball of rice. Offers of help came from all over the world, and as each day revealed new horrors, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama said that even in a country with a long history of earthquakes, the Kobe tragedy was "a disaster that nobody could even imagine." At week's end criticism was mounting against government relief efforts that were deemed too little and too late...
...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...
...doctors seeking to treat victims of the quake, and reduced the income tax burden on residents who suffered the heaviest losses. But the measures did little to curb the clamor of the opposition New Frontier Party -- some of whose members are calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama...