震災と復興：神戸が教えるものEarthquake and Recovery

I am in Kobe today. For me, Kobe is a place filled with memories, as during my childhood summer vacations my father would organize beach volleyball tournaments held near Kobe, and around the same time fireworks festivals were also taking place, so we visited there almost every year. After that, I had fewer opportunities to come, but around the time of the pandemic, I frequently visited again and spent rich moments enjoying the night sea breeze.

Kobe flourished as one of the leading port cities in Kansai, but what drastically changed its history was the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. This earthquake, which struck on January 17, 1995, caused the prosperity the city had built over many years to collapse overnight and forced it to start over from scratch. Moreover, for an island nation like Japan, the most crucial defense bases had always been placed along the coastline since ancient times, and Kobe was no exception. In particular, its location between Settsu in northern Osaka and Harima, surrounded by the massive Rokko mountain range, formed a distinctive geography where people had already lived since the Jomon period. By the Yayoi period, it had become an important hub where cultures, people, and goods from other regions intersected. What is especially intriguing is that not only in the Izumo region but also in this area, numerous large deposits of bronze bells (dotaku, 銅鐸) have been unearthed. Personally, I see this as evidence that the Kobe bay area once served as a crucial maritime defense hub for the Yamato polity, and that who controlled Kobe’s bay would have been of vital importance to the chieftains of the surrounding lands.

Heading west from Kobe leads to the Hyogo coastal areas of Maiko and Akashi, from where Awaji Island is close, making this region a key point connecting Shikoku and the Kansai coastline through the Seto Inland Sea. In fact, Japanese mythology designates Awaji Island as the very first land created in the birth of Japan. For this reason, it is believed that groups close to what we might later call pirates had existed here since ancient times, and given the tides, it was also an extremely difficult area to navigate for the ancient peoples who moved by sea. With such a historical background of coastal defense, the Kobe area developed into a place where cultures and people from the Chugoku region, Shikoku, and Tokai converged into Kansai. This spirit later manifested in the postwar period with the rise of the Yamaguchi-gumi, a yakuza syndicate, which achieved the first unification of Japan’s underworld. Initially, they were merely a small local force controlling coastal interests, but with the emergence of their third leader, Kazuo Taoka (田岡一雄), they expanded rapidly to become a nationwide power.

At the same time, Kobe uniquely developed as a gateway to Western culture after the Meiji Restoration. It had the largest foreign settlement in Japan, and rules shaped around the daily lives of the residents there became part of the foundations of city planning. Under this influence, Western cuisine and the consumption of beef—foods that were officially forbidden in Japan during the Edo period—spread through the port and transformed Kobe into a city of exotic atmosphere.

However, after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, circumstances changed drastically. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, I myself have witnessed the recovery efforts in Sanriku many times, and what struck me each time was that the region should have learned from Kobe’s recovery as a cautionary model for the future. The reason is that during the time of the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, Japan had not yet fully entered the collapse of the bubble economy, and so during its recovery period, massive state subsidies were poured into Kobe, temporarily restoring a superficial glamour to its urban areas. But as the subsidies ran out, the true nature of the city emerged, and it lost its former uniqueness and continued to drift.

As a result, although walking through Kobe today gives the impression that there are many people, the city clearly lacks the vitality it once had, with an accelerating outflow of young people. Even though Sannomiya and Motomachi shopping districts still see considerable foot traffic on weekdays, compared to the past the city’s strength has clearly weakened, and its appeal as a tourist destination is stagnant. Looking at this situation, it becomes clear that regions with futures even harsher than Kobe’s are Sanriku and the Noto Peninsula, which experienced an earthquake last New Year. The government has in practice already begun to abandon rescue efforts for these areas, and unlike Kobe’s case, the injection of massive recovery funds can no longer be expected.

While Japan’s strained national finances are certainly a factor, this means that in the future, a sharp divide will emerge between regions that can recover from earthquakes and tsunamis and those that cannot. In other words, the latter will simply be abandoned. Even now, revisiting Kobe after a long time, there is an air of something not working well beneath the surface bustle. This is precisely the present reality created by the subsidy-dependent recovery of the 1990s, the face of a future that was entered without deep reflection.