The Architecture of Resilience

I recently plowed through Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" for yet another class assignment (yay, grad school. I have no social life but hey, whatever, the Barnes & Nobles people love me).

Klein's portrayals of societies, entangled in the aftermath of disaster, transported me to my own experience with a large-scale catastrophe. The year was 1995 and I was in the fifth grade, my thoughts teetering between an impending math project and my project partner whom I had a not-so-camouflaged crush on, as I made my bed that January evening. Hours later, my family and I were jolted awake by a guttural roar from the ground beneath us, and a series of shakes that has to this day, left me terrified of even the slightest bit of turbulence when I am aboard an airplane. We had just been acquainted with an earthquake that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale, a tectonic beast that would claim the lives of approximately 6,400. In 20 seconds, The Great Hanshin Earthquake, as it would soon be referred to by journalists, eager to get knee-deep in the world's disaster du jour, had destroyed my hometown of Kobe, Japan.

Though the week that followed remains hazy, each day blurred by the next, what I remember about the airy parking lot where we sought refuge (along with dozens of other families, sleeping in their cars for at least 5 days) was an unflinching sense of resilience. It came in the form of the orderly lines for food and water, with virtually no one cutting in. It was also apparent in the steely determination exhibited by the adults as they made brief but strategic trips to our disheveled homes, combing the debris for essentials, fully aware that violent aftershocks were only minutes away.

Much like the individuals whom Klein portrays as the vehicles of "movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around," (Klein 466), the inhabitants of my city seemed to be experts in the architecture of resilience. The Japanese psyche has often been singled out for its ability to reflect something called a typhoon mentality, "a fatalistic acceptance of nature's awesome might and a great capacity to dig themselves out after such catastrophes" (Murase 142), largely attributed to the nation's physical susceptibility to geological disasters.

Approximately 2 months after the quake, however, the city government proposed a rebuilding method, valiantly titled, "The Phoenix Plan." It was an effort to "wipe the parcel clean" (Oakes 4), something that would certainly—according to Klein, at least—be cause for alarm. The government's wish list included a Super Convention Center and plenty of high-rises with well-stocked shopping plazas in their basements (Oakes 4). To quote the governor of Hyogo Prefecture, the state-level government for which Kobe is the capital, Phoenix was not only designed to "restore the region to its pre-quake condition but also to solve underlying problems faced by Japan, such as an increasingly aging population, the need for an open economy, and the concentration of problems associated with increased urbanization around the world" (Oakes 4). Such rhetoric is heavily contaminated with disaster capitalism and eerily reminiscent to that of the Sri Lankan government's, post-tsunami, as it attempted to "fulfill its destiny as a playground for the plutonomy set" (Klein 393).

Today, over a decade after the quake, the larger Kobe area is home to its own version of the American theme park, Universal Studios. Malls, gargantuan for Japanese standards, are sprouting up in the outskirts. On the flip side, there are more inspiring stories, found in spots including the Nada ward of the city, where 220 houses were charred as a result of quake-related fires. Nada's residents held a series of land readjustment meetings, through which they agreed to "give up a certain percentage of their own land to create wider roads," (Okazaki 1) a prime example of civil society in action. Whether such goals were specifically outlined in the phoenix's agenda remains unclear. For the moment, the relationship between Kobe's municipal government, driven by opportunistic impulses and its residents, discovering a growing sense of community, is as unpredictable as the fault lines that rest under the city.