Nagata is a district in Kobe that was particularly badly hit by the 1995 `quake and the fire that followed. This account was first published in Issue 17 of "The Gaijin Gleaner", Feb 18 1995


" You walk alone though Nagata - or in small silent groups. The desolation, the destruction, the sterility of what is left - nothingness incarnate - bears down too hard, leaving one alone, trying to comprehend what passed here. One thinks of war. Of Dresden. Berlin. The Blitz. Hiroshima.

As one walks one sees ghosts - not the ghosts of those who lived and died here - the fire has taken too much - but the images of places and people one knows. This street becomes the Fukuoka shotengai in one`s mind - that the New Otani... And then one sees a shoe, a woman`s bag - and the ghosts DO return, and one gains a sense - for a moment so overpowering that one shrinks back - of the people who must have lived and worked here and the scope of the tragedy.

There is nothing much left, save the fire charred husks of the stronger buildings. Most of the fires came late to Nagata - hours after the quake proper, when the electricity was switched back on... The trapped burned.

But soon an "ordinariness" descends - a matter of factness. Another charred building, Another shattered house - and look - over there - almost undamaged, a 3 story building. Even as one closes and sees the 2nd floor compressed into a few small inches above the pavement that bewildering sense of "ordinariness" remains...

There is little pain obviously on show in Nagata, small knots of Japanese wander through the ruins, some taking photos, oblivious to the tiny clot of gaijin guiltily doing the same. Then we pass an old man - back arched, oblivious to all, face contorted in a Munch like scream. And briefly glimpse again the horrors that passed here.

Then back to the camp, scavenging a large tub for washing clothes, back past the mysterious shattered old one-story building with its 25 TV antennas (... five floors worth) to people, screaming, laughing children and the sqaulor of a canvas shanty-town.®