After the Quake: Trauma and Its Seismic Reverberations
On January 17, 1995, around 5:46am, Kobe, Japan was hit by an earthquake lasting an estimated 11 seconds, killing over 6,500 people, destroying more than 106,000 buildings, and leaving approximately 319,000 people homeless.1 The aftermath of the earthquake in Kobe is often studied and revered by economists because Kobe recovered financially very quickly after the earthquake, bouncing back from an estimated $114 billion in damage almost completely within two years.2 Although there has generally been less academic focus on the psychological effects of the earthquake on its citizens, the Kobe earthquake was a turning point in the kind of psychiatric care offered to ordinary citizens in Japan.3 Even though Kobe was home to the largest hub of psychiatric hospitals in Japan at the time, psychiatric care was largely less attentive to the disorders of high-functioning people and was mainly limited to treatment for individuals with serious abnormal psychological conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. However, that began to shift after the earthquake:
From very shortly after the quake, however, a very different perspective on the psychological effects of the earthquake experience became a major topic for news media as well as volunteers pouring into Kobe. This view focused on the psychological effect of the earthquake on “ordinary people”. This effect included symptoms such as sleep disturbances and nightmares, intrusive thoughts and memories of the events, anxiety, and/ or feelings of guilt about having survived while others died.4
While there remained deficits and certainly tensions around the differences in the level and kind of psychiatric care in Japan versus the United States, the psychological response to the needs of the general public became a critical issue in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. This manifested not only in broader attention to who was cared for, but also in the language used to describe that care, reflecting a major cultural shift.5
At the time of the earthquake, Haruki Murakami had been living in self-imposed exile in the United States. Nevertheless, from thousands of miles away, he felt the impact of the earthquake, which had devastated the town he grew up in. Two months later, when people in the city of Tokyo were further traumatized by a terrorist-led sarin gas attack on the subways, which killed 12 and injured over 5,000 people, Murakami moved back to Japan and dedicated the next several years to writing both Underground, a nonfiction account of the sarin gas attacks, and the short stories eventually published in the collection After the Quake. He saw it as his duty as a novelist to create a world in which the ordinary citizens of Kobe had a path to healing:
Because Kobe is my home town, it was too raw for me. I have many friends there. If I had interviewed those people, I would have been so depressed, so sad. But in fiction I could make up my own world, so it was easier for me. Violence can drive a hole through your mind, through your body. It can cut a passage to something very important. Before the quake, we thought that the ground was solid and hard, but not anymore. It became unstable, unpredictable, soft. I think that was what I wanted to write.
After that, there were so many more disasters-- 9/11, the tsunami, and others. I asked myself what I could do for the people who had suffered in those disasters, and I thought, what I can do is write good fiction. Because when I write a good story, we can better understand one another. If you are a reader and I’m a writer, I don’t know you, but in the underground world of fiction there is a secret passageway between us: we can send messages to each other subconsciously. So I think that is a way I can contribute.6
The stories in After the Quake take place in Japan in the two months of relative peace after the earthquake and before the sarin gas attacks, a time in which people were freshly reeling from the unexpected catastrophe caused by the earthquake, and blissfully unaware of the next unexpected tragedy. By exploring the lives of self-professed “ordinary people” in the days and weeks after the earthquake, the stories, structurally and thematically, show us the importance of moving away from narratives that no longer serve us and creating stories we can live with.
It’s easier to understand what is happening in the six stories in Murakami's After the Quake once we understand what happens in an earthquake and the ways we measure its impact. Though often imagined as a single event lasting several seconds, an earthquake is a natural and unpredictable consequence of the unseen forces beneath the earth’s surface.7 Though the ground we stand on appears to be solid and unmoving, it is the outermost and thinnest of the four major layers of Earth (called the crust) and is comprised of a number of distinct plates that fit together about as well as poorly-designed puzzle pieces. These tectonic plates are, in fact, constantly moving, gliding past one another along edges we call fault lines. An earthquake occurs when the jagged edges along the tectonic plates and fault lines within those plates get stuck on one another and then (because they are always moving or trying to move) get unstuck.8 As they slip past one another, they release the energy they stored while stuck like a revved engine put in drive, resulting in a massive vertical and horizontal upheaval.
An earthquake is measured by its magnitude and intensity.9 Magnitude is the more objective measurement. Miles away from the epicenter of the earthquake, machines called seismographs10 can measure the magnitude of an earthquake via the extremely delicate horizontal and vertical vibrations of a pendulum. A seismograph’s proximity to the earthquake epicenter dictates the how much amplitude the machine will observe (ie. how drastic the lines on the rotating drum beneath the pendulum will be), but seismographs can detect vibrational patterns from an earthquake from as far away as the other side of the Earth.11
A more subjective, but equally important measurement of an earthquake is its intensity,12 which is measured by an observer at or near the epicenter of an earthquake after it has occurred. Put bluntly, “an earthquake will have only one magnitude, but many intensities”13 as one’s assessment of the damage can vary from human to human and depends on subjective factors such as human perception and the construction quality of the buildings affected.14 Stone houses, for example, can withstand more impact than wooden houses15 and therefore the damage of those might register to an observer as resulting from the impact of a less-intense earthquake. One might also say that one’s relationship to the damaged city itself could affect his or her assessment of the damage, his or her perception, and the impact of his or her response to it.
Though not as easily or objectively measured as the magnitude of an earthquake or as observable to the human eye as an earthquake’s intensity, the resulting psychological trauma from this kind of global disaster is an important and valid measurement of its impact. It might even be quantifiably relative to the event’s magnitude, intensity, and the population of people at the epicenter. We already know that psychological trauma can have deleterious effects on a society. In “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” Alexander McFarlane and Bessel van der Kolk, two of the leading experts on trauma, argue that
failure to deal with the plight of victims can be disastrous for a society. The costs of reenactment of trauma in society, in the form of child abuse, continued violence, and lack of productivity, are staggering. Failure to face the reality of trauma can have devastating political consequences as well.16
When global disaster occurs, the resilience of the individuals in a society largely depends on that society’s ability to acknowledge trauma and create meaning from the disaster as “individuals and societies without coherent myths about having successfully transcended adversity lack the identity necessary to serve as a guide on how to structure responses to current challenges.”17 Though we tend to consider first the traumatic impact to those in an event’s immediate vicinity, we have learned that trauma reverberates, and even those located far away from the center of it can experience an emotional toll.
1 Breslau, Joshua. “Globalizing Disaster Trauma: Psychiatry, Science, and Culture after the Kobe Earthquake.” Ethos, vol. 28, no. 2, 2000, pp. 174–97. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2000.28.2.174.
2 Horwich, George. “Economic Lessons of the Kobe Earthquake.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 48, no. 3, 2000, pp. 521–42. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1086/452609.
3 Breslau, Joshua. “Globalizing Disaster Trauma: Psychiatry, Science, and Culture after the Kobe Earthquake.” Ethos, vol. 28, no. 2, 2000, pp. 174–97. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2000.28.2.174.
4 Ibid, 180
5 For example, after the Kobe earthquake, psychology graduate students visited primary schools in Kobe where they asked children to draw pictures of the earthquake as part of a therapeutic intervention called kokoro no kea, or “care for the heart.” Psychiatry in Japan had up to that point been called seishin igaku, with the word seishin connoting a masculine spirit that is stable and unwavering. After the earthquake, however, psychiatry began adopting the term kokoro, a more abstract term with feminine connotations, meaning “heart.” Breslau, “Globalizing Disaster Trauma: Psychiatry, Science, and Culture after the Kobe Earthquake.” p. 181-182
6 Deborah Treisman, !The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2019
7 Wald, Lisa. “The Science of Earthquakes | U.S. Geological Survey.” USGS, www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquakehazards/science-earthquakes. Accessed 28 July 2022.
8 Ibid.
9 Robinson, Andrew. Earthquake: Nature and Culture (Kindle ed., London: Reaction Books Ltd, 2012), 60.
10 A seismograph measures primary (P) waves (measured vertically) and the more damaging secondary (S) (horizontal) waves. P waves travel fastest and are the first movements we feel during an earthquake. They move the seismograph along a vertical axis, upward or downward, depending on which direction the plate moved at the hypocenter, the earthquake’s focus underground. The slower S waves tend to cause more damage as most buildings are not designed to withstand lateral movement. Ibid, p. 60
11 Robinson, Andrew. Earthquake: Nature and Culture. (Kindle ed., London: Reaction Books Ltd, 2012), p. 32
12 “The particular intensity scale normally used today…is a modified version of that created by the Italian volcanologist Giuseppe Mercalli in 1902. It has major drawbacks…Still, intensity scales are extremely useful.” Ibid, p. 60
13 SDAO and Shake Alert. “Earthquake Magnitude Vs. Shaking Intensity; ShakeAlert Provides Estimates for Both.” Special Districts Association of Oregon, 2022, www.sdao.com/earthquake-magnitude-vs-shaking-intensityshakealert- provides-estimates-for-both
14 Robinson, Andrew. Earthquake: Nature and Culture. Kindle ed., London, Reaction Books Ltd, 2012. p. 60
15 SDAO and Shake Alert. “Earthquake Magnitude Vs. Shaking Intensity; ShakeAlert Provides Estimates for Both.” Special Districts Association of Oregon, 2022, www.sdao.com/earthquake-magnitude-vs-shaking-intensityshakealert-provides-estimates-for-both
16 Kolk, Bessel van der and Alexander C. McFarlane. “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York, The Guilford Press, 2007, pp. 24–46. p. 33
17 Ibid, p. 29