On the Other End of the Story   

How the Kobe earthquake shook one journalist's view of journalism.

Flames licked the skeletons of buildings. Entire blocks of collapsed homes sprawled across streets. Survivors wrapped in bloody bandages stared blankly at the ruins of their lives.

It was a disaster scene straight off a CNN monitor, only this time I was living it. The earthquake that killed 6,000 people in Kobe, Japan, chipped away at more than my dishes and my confidence. It undermined my complacency about journalism so thoroughly that I'm still shaking two years later.

In surviving the earthquake, I realized how completely we rely on television to validate experience. I realized how impossible it is for any medium to convey the scope of a disaster or the trauma of its victims. And I realized that journalism, the profession I have practiced and taught and defended for 20 years, deserves too much of its reputation for insensitivity.

From September 1994 to September 1995, my husband and I taught at Kobe Shoin Women's University and came to love the city and its people. At 5:46 on the morning of January 17 we were jolted awake in the freezing darkness. Our apartment building jerked violently back and forth, as if caught between giant sumo wrestlers. The noise, like a thousand trains tunneling under our futons, rumbled so loudly that we didn't hear our dishes breaking.

We were lucky. Our neighborhood, in the hills above downtown Kobe, suffered so little damage that when the sun came up, children in school uniforms and salarymen in suits stood waiting for buses that never came. None of us realized the devastation that lay just a few minutes' walk downhill.

Before I took that walk, I had always accused television of making bad situations look worse. In this case, I was wrong. Television can show the miles of destruction and the rescues from the rubble. But it can't recreate the way the breath is yanked out of you when you see a family's life reduced to a shower of dust. It can't reproduce the helpless fury that engulfs you as you watch entire blocks burning savagely with no firetrucks in sight. Most of all, television can't convey the guilt you feel about surviving, the fear that nothing, not even the ground you walk on, will ever seem safe again.

As we navigated Kobe's blocked and burning streets that day, looking for our friends, the tragedies we saw were so excruciatingly personal that I could think only one thing: "I shouldn't be here." Who was I to intrude on the worst moments of people's lives? I winced as that thought struck me over and over, even though I lived in Kobe and had good reason to be walking those streets. What if I had been there as a journalist, hunting for the most dire devastation to photograph, the saddest-looking victims to assault with microphones?

The journalist part of my brain knew that someone had to do that work, to help the world understand the suffering and the reality that life can end in an instant. Once or twice it even crossed my mind that this was my chance to break into the big leagues, to report what for a few days would be the top news story on the planet. But when I looked at those haunted faces, I couldn't do it.

What we saw that day looked like the aftermath of war, the end of the world. We saw, but we couldn't quite believe. One reason, of course, was that this burnt-out shell of a place had only hours before been a vibrant, sophisticated city – something no reporter swooping in from elsewhere could appreciate. Gradually, however, I recognized another cause of our disbelief: We were waiting to see the earthquake on television. A disaster is not a disaster until a news anchor pronounces it so.

The bad news for the average viewer is that TV can't capture the emotional impact of living through a disaster. The good news for a survivor is that TV's distance is just what the psychologist ordered. In our living rooms, rocked by aftershocks, we could watch events unfold without feeling like voyeurs.

The hard part was life on the other side of that screen. Picture this: 3 a.m., 21 harrowing hours after the earthquake. Six people, including two small children, are crammed into our tiny apartment, finally asleep between violent aftershocks and worse nightmares. The phone rings and I jump sky-high.

"Joe Blow, WXYZ-TV," a voice barks. "Can you talk to us about the earthquake?"

I'm thinking, "What about, 'Are you OK' or, 'I got your name from so-and-so' or, at the very least, 'Sorry to call in the middle of the night' "? Exhausted, I say only, "I guess so."

"Hold on."

A long wait ensues, during which another major aftershock hits. It's pitch black and freezing cold and I'm trying hard not to let the fear shriek out of me and wake the kids. Another voice comes on the line: "Are you there? Hold on." This happens four times. Then the fifth person comes on and demands, "Who are you, anyway?"

"Hello?" I think. "Didn't you call me ?" Finally, someone gets around to asking a question, and it's that all-time TV classic: "How did it feel to be in an earthquake?"

Of the five or six reporters who called us, only one had taken the time to frame a question before picking up the phone. Though most of the calls came in the middle of the night, not a single reporter apologized for waking us, as if they were unaware that the world doesn't operate on Eastern Standard Time. Only one reporter bothered to inquire about our welfare, and he was so solicitous that I talked to him for 10 minutes before I realized he was interviewing me for a story.

I should have known, of course, but journalists who cover disasters need to remember one crucial fact: The survivors aren't thinking straight. They ricochet constantly from hysterical elation at being alive to abject fear of imminent doom. These mood swings don't leave a lot of brain cells free for remembering the basic tenets of journalism.

So treat disaster survivors gently. Inquire after their well-being. Listen to their responses. Explain what you're doing and what you hope they can contribute. Ask specific questions, and give them time to organize their jumbled thoughts. You may be rewarded with a quote that, unlike most of what's reported from disaster scenes, is actually worth printing or broadcasting.

And if you get a quote, quote it correctly. I'd like to complain that I was misquoted in several stories about the earthquake, but I fear I really did say those stupid things. The friends who stayed with us, on the other hand, repeatedly saw their words mutate in print. I listened as they told reporters touching anecdotes about their 2-year- old daughter's reaction to the earthquake. Later, I read the stories that twisted those anecdotes into something trite or ugly or just plain wrong. My friends were gracious but hurt. On behalf of my profession, I was mortified.

Since then, I haven't found much cause for enthusiasm in the coverage of Kobe. When the shaking stopped and the fires were extinguished, the media moved on to the next disaster. In doing so they missed two years' worth of good stories – not just about the suffering that continued long after the cameras blinked off, but about the ways in which the earthquake laid bare the strengths and weaknesses of the Japanese system.

How relief money was allocated, how officials balanced commercial needs with human needs, how a hierarchy based on inflexible rules withstood the test of extraordinary times – all these things could have provided rare insights into a complex culture. The earthquake's aftermath opened fissures of light in the dark mass of secrets that is Japan. But few reporters stuck around long enough to explore them.

I know the Kobe story will never mean as much to others as it does to me. In journalistic terms, it's ancient history – and has been since two days after the quake, when the mother of a friend of mine was told by her local paper in England that it was too late to run a story reporting that her son had survived. It's old news, the editors told her; no one would be interested anymore.

As a journalist, I've probably made equally heartless judgments. But as a human being who watched Kobe burn, I live that "old news" earthquake every day. I still jump at loud noises, cringe at the slightest vibration. I trust people more, nature less. I no longer believe much of what I once held true about journalism; the new beliefs that will fill those holes are still under construction. But I now have proof that one thing I've always told my journalism students is true: An amazing number of national and international news stories really do have a New Hampshire angle. In Kobe, that angle was me.