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  • Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography of Crisis and Opportunity
  • Takehiro Watanabe
Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography of Crisis and Opportunity. By David W. Edgington. University of British Columbia, 2010 (hardcover $95.00) and 2011 (softcover $45.00). 328 328 pages.

The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (Hanshin Awaji daishinsai) of 1995, known also as the Great Hanshin Earthquake and, more colloquially, as the Kobe earthquake, took more than 6,000 lives and destroyed more than 200,000 homes. With its epicenter near Kobe, a major port city in Western Japan, the seismic activity demolished local infrastructure, cut off neighborhoods, and created a desperate urban refugee situation even as efforts were being made to rescue people from under the rubble. The calamity that befell the city transformed the way the nation prepares for disasters, adding the psychological term torauma (trauma) to the public lexicon and promoting the earthquake-proofing of infrastructure in subsequent years. Pundits saw it, along with the Aum Shinrikyō subway gas attacks of the same year, as a call to fix social problems created in the wake of Japan's rapid postwar economic growth. The disaster also became a watershed moment in the history of Japanese civil society as volunteers flocked to the stricken city to help in the relief effort and the term borantiā (volunteer) became a national catchphrase. At the same time, the earthquake helped extend the life of the country's postwar construction industry, which received new government funding for reconstruction and disaster management purposes.

David W. Edgington's Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography of Crisis and Opportunity gives an informative account of these transformations in the postquake city by analyzing the decade-long interplay that took place between local neighborhoods and the city government in the rebuilding effort, beginning with the immediate rescue and relief work and continuing on through long-term reconstruction projects. While shorter academic treatments of the earthquake exist, this work—which should prove valuable both to students of and to active participants in disaster management and recovery—is perhaps the only full-length study in English of the city's long-term reconstruction effort. Referencing government documents and interviews with officials, the author, who is a geographer, investigates the political contest over the meaning that urban spaces held for residents and planners in proposing, negotiating, and implementing the details of the city's recovery program.

For decades, if not centuries, seismological concerns have governed the political economy of urban development in Japan. Kobe's experience offers an important lesson for cities in Japan and around the world in ways of dealing with natural disasters. The book deftly documents the thinking that was behind local policy decisions in response to the emergency and the innovations made to older models of urban development. During past recovery efforts, for example, the Japanese government tended to funnel money into public infrastructure, but stayed away from offering financial support to individual victims. This trend continued after the Kobe earthquake, as the national government followed "the principle of not offering assistance for the restoration of individual lives of earthquake victims" (p. 103). Edgington, however, observes a slight shift toward helping individual victims as the government earmarked funding for public housing and loan assistance for the rebuilding of privately owned homes. One can see, in hindsight, how these new measures may have informed some of the government-led recovery programs implemented following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. [End Page 384]

Reconstruction after a major disaster is a complex and vast undertaking, but the book does a fine job of giving us details without resorting to obtuse technical discussions. The work's accessibility derives from the author's primary goal, to which the narrative often returns: what were the long-term results of policy decisions made early on in the disaster's aftermath? Were those choices, made in moments of urgency and chaos, the right ones? Did, for example, the sweeping makeover of the waterfront benefit the local economy? Kobe's recovery is noted for its relative swiftness, but did the more visible reconstruction hide other, less perceptible problems? In answering these questions, the book presents not only economic indexes and city plans, but also reports of local...

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