By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
1-14-25

The Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995 (30 years ago) was a monstrously destructive calamity that destroyed the edifices of a most gentile and largely westernized urban culture in Japan and damaged the nation’s main shipping port. As an editor with the Tokyo-based Japan Times - an English-language newspaper - I proceeded to the quake zone with a feeling of dread due to my childhood past as a pupil at the city’s Marist Brother’s Catholic school from grades 3 to 6. As it turned out, I was the only reporter among hundreds of others to have resided in the pre-quake city and knew the region intimately, especially due to our team’s soccer games at local schools as well as weekend hiking and camping in the close-by Rokko mountains - and also getting into violent frays with “chimpira” punks, many of them sons of the largest Yakuza gang in all of Japan - the Yamaguchi-gumi. Kobe was a study in contrasts - East and West, Russian and Asian, Nazi and American, high culture and bawdy, and friendly versus sinister.

Along with Ken Crane, our in-house cartoonist/artist for our weekend edition, I went to Tokyo Station in the early morning a few days after the quake to board a Shinkansen high-speed rail along with a few passengers delivering relief supplies. The train halted in the environs of Osaka, which had been lightly rocked by the temblor but emerged unharmed, where we switched to a much slower local train to arrive at the closest still-standing station on the outskirts of Kobe, Nishinomiya (west shrine) station, still more than a dozen kilometers distance from city center. Aid-bearing volunteers exited the train with huge back-packs to trudge along rubble-strewn streets for the all-day walk to the still standing office tower of the city government - where they were sheltered and propagandized with Establishment nonsense. Instead, our two-man team took a different approach to that deliberate obstruction by getting around it.

I caught an older rail employee inside a wicket gate and stretched out my arm against the wall to deny him exit. As he stared at my menacing eyes, I uttered in a yakuza gangster tone, which made him visibly nervous. In brutally threatening Japanese (doing my best to sound like Jimmy Cagney), I drawled: “There’s another couple of rail lines to city center that nobody seems to know about  - from here to the Takarazu and then a secondary line to Sanda on to downtown Kobe. Where do I catch it?” Unable to extricate himself and without his whistle, he realized that this no-good bastard was a very bad guy, probably a gangster from inside the heart of Kobe. So he gave me the instructions and promised him “I won’t tell anybody if you don’t.” With that he sighed and relaxed. “Oh, and thanks much because we can’t let these bastards get away with a cover-up, eh honcho?” the last word meaning “boss”, a sign of respect for him. That triggered a wicked smile of pride for being secretly a part of a bureaucrat-busting team - like a true Kobe-ite, stealthily anti-Establishment. We bowed to each other as honorable souls out to uncover the truth. And he actually waved to wish us good luck as we boarded the secret rail line. Japanese life is much like a kabuki drama - with an outward show of brutal arrogance and inner compassion.

The train was otherwise empty all the way to Takarazuka - the home theater of an all-women’s song-and-dance group - and the then new Osamu Tezuka museum of manga comics (Atom-u aka Astro Boy, Black Jack and Buddha) - both closed due to the absence of tourists. From that point, a different waiting train took us as the only passengers to Sanda - the original farm district that bred real Kobe beef - which were aged plow-pulling bulls in retirement and treated by their farmer masters providing kind old-age care with bottles of cheap sake wine and massages, which tenderized their fat-rippled haunches for the world’s best beef (in contrast to today’s fake young heifer steaks passing for “Kobe beef” - what a sick joke on unknowing tourists).

At lunch hour at our Catholic school in Kobe we students ate through gigantic haunches of the real deal, since the vast majority of Japanese in those times did not consume meat due to Buddhist dietary restrictions. Heavy protein gave us an edge on the soccer fields and for rock-climbing along the Mount Rokko range. Our teachers from the Basque regions of France and Spain were super-tough hombres (who kept their Japanese mistresses out of sight of the Nazi school principle, Brother Charles - a heroic priest that we loved to hate yet totally admired as a role model of how to survive under the absurdly liberal, totally unrealistic and completely corrupt American regime since the MacArthur era in Japan. In that, we were expected to be good Catholics even if dad was a spooky Free Mason.

As a consequence of a high protein diet, our soccer team were the toughest in the region with the only serious competition coming from those other carnivores - at the North Korean school, who played dirty bump-and-run on orders from their fanatic coaches. How did I break a wrist-bone playing soccer? Because the Korean mid-fielder knew how while running side-by-side to get a cleat into my shoe laces and then kick up high for a judo-toss into the air. Then the commie ref blew the whistle on me for interference. Since our international team headed by Valentine Morozoff (son of an anti-Bolshevik Russian Tsarist officer in Siberia) always beat them by a couple of scores (which were routinely called back by the officiating). After every game there’d be as expected a vicious fight with the club-wielding Korean punks, which our side always won fair and square with fisticuffs and judo throws to fend off their staves and iron chains. The Korean War never ended but continued viciously in the alley behind their schoolyard - and again as always it ended in a draw. Catholics versus Commies in a hotheaded battle, can you imagine that in the world’s most ultra-civilized city? We always emerged bloody but basically victorious – if that means anything at all in the crazed fray - because of our big forwards - Farnoush a Persian and Bommy from India - who basically taught the rest of us how to survive on the home turf of the Yakuza and chimpira (wannabe-yak punks). Most of us were not baptized but were fanatically loyal to Catholicism and routinely said our daily prayers.

A Korean and Underclass Debacle

Bygones were of course a thing of a happy past amid the rubble of Kobe. I turned out to be the only reporter to interview dozens of Korean residents who were not receiving any aid from the “socialist” city government but instead harassed by the police and had to treat their own injuries with dirty rags. Perhaps in penance for my youthful venom, I consoled them with a promise to write up an expose about their plight and give hell to the racist city fathers. In the aftermath, much of the town was still smoldering from gas-caused fires, I was blocked by police barricades from entering the Korean district renowned for making sports shoes. In the distance the home to Korean conscript slaves prior and during WWII was a smoldering pile of ash-covered rubble. The village of the damned also included the “Buraku-min” - the slum people, a traditional underclass of trash haulers, scrape iron peddlers and gardeners (dirt was considered filthy and contaminated under the old Buddhist caste system that ranged from the blessed elite downward to the denizens of hell on Earth of “grungy sub-humans”.)

During our youthful scout days, two decades before the Quake, on afternoons of heavy rain, our troop had to descent from the hills to Nagata-ku, follow a narrow stream and then cross utterly black-stained soil past shriveled men bent over the flowing water to wash-out dye from long lengths of cloth. Never daring to look up at “their social superiors”, they were the Buraku-min, the bottom-tier underclass damned by Buddhism to an afterlife in Hell. We’d wade across the murky pools of water and then head toward Suma town past the Korean district, where huge smoked snakes were hanged under pit fires for the medicinal soup bowl. We could hear the clatter of old-style sewing machines on the second-floors of rickety wooden buildings. For us, used to the purity of heavenly blessings, it was a journey through the depths of hell - all due to colonialism and religious discrimination. As much as we hated the Korean teams, they were our peers on the soccer battlefield - true believers in the justice of their cause against our side, the evil imperialists.

So at the barrier where cops swore at us with vulgar disdain, Ken and I backed away from the scene of destruction - the entire narrow zone of Nagata-cho reduced to burnt rubble and still smoldering with the stench of toasted bodies. To skip ahead: After I got back to Tokyo with an incipient investigation from my findings, reporter Peter Kenny with UPI discovered that the police were given the order: “If Nagata district catches on fire, do nothing.” The fire department waited for four days before dragging a hose from the Inland Sea several miles up to the smoldering village, way too late to save anyone. Alligator tears were shed by the Socialist Party city fathers. That’s a polite way of celebrating genocide. I informed Peter that below the manhole covers along the main street of the Village of the Damned was a year-round river flowing from the nearby Rokko chain of mountains and hills. All the firemen had to do was lower a pump into an open man-hole for endless water to suppress the fires. The unchecked blaze was a deliberate crime against humanity.

That observation blew the lid off the official cover-up and the no good batards (excuse the French) with the Kobe City government responded that as chief conspirator I commit “seppuku” - ritual suicide with a short sword for defaming the honor of the mayor. When that telegram arrived at the Japan Times office, our Japanese staffers were stunned silent, whereas I declared that the bureaucrats can go to hell and if they still objected I’d challenge them to an old-style sword fight in the city plaza. (Since my samurai near-ancestors were renowned for their unbreakable swordsmanship, the city officials dropped their idiotic order and went silent.) By evening, a lot of staffers - print-shop crew and journalists were cheering at a local bar over our counter-insult to those stuffed shirts. Everyone over their cups of sake wondered how can bureaucrats act like WWII was still in progress?

As compared with the city fathers, the gangsters with the Yakuza were near-perfect gentlemen. When we arrived to central Kobe on the Sanda train, we immediately got lost in the maze of new buildings (the city center had totally been remodeled after my schooling). The cartoonist-guide Ken Crane pointed out in plain sight the head office of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the biggest and baddest yakuza gang in all the world. “Ken,” I whispered, “Why not we ask them to have one of their thugs guide us around?” The area is called “Kitano-cho” or north district, which was the center for bars and pretty bar-fly girls. So after quietly knocking, I walked into the office bowed slightly and explained briefly our predicament - while a huge gangster kept staring me up and down as an impolite unscheduled intruder and maybe a police detective.

To my surprise a slim fellow of India origin raised his head from a desk where he was adding up the financial losses from shutdown bars and houses of ill-repute and luckily did not recognize me. It was Sanjib. I remembered him from the very first day of class for me and a little American kid named Reginald, when 24 European and Asian boys swarmed over us to dish out a beating for much-hated Yankee enemies. (Their parents were German Nazis, Italian fascists, South African collaborators, and various Indonesians and Indians whose folks had sided with Japanese imperialism,) So a two-hour fight proceeded, which ended with all of them beaten bloody and with shirts torn and leaving little Reggie quaking in fear and smiling in delight at impossibly winning. I never told any of those participants that I had just arrived from my grandparents’ home in a black ghetto in Los Angeles where I routinely had to beat down and knockout crazy young thugs in the alleyways and schoolyards. Rough business, alright, but enjoyable to hear a loser moan “Uncle”. Knowing that I was "a tough cookie" my stepfather with U.S. intel put us into that fascistic school more as an irritant than for an education, the latter which was excellent at providing an Old World sophisticated education from Latin to French and a great choir in the chapel.. The boys were brainwashed by their fathers to hate the Yanks with a passion, even if it meant praising Fidel Castro. After a while, we got to be good friends with the long war well behind our generation, although their dads had an abiding hatred of my step-father as the Enemy No.1.

So after the initiation ceremony in the schoolyard, the phone to my mother’s number was buzzing all night with outraged mothers’ voices unrepentant for restarting World War II. She politely brushed them off as sore losers after washing and bandaging poor little Reggie. And so now - the secretary of the world’s biggest and toughest gang was sitting at the front desk with puzzlement whereas I recalled holding him in a head-lock to bash his skull against a tree trunk that went thunk-thunk-thunk! So here I was a dead man walking into “ada” which in Japanese means vengeance. “You went to Marist school? I don’t remember,” was his answer. I must have knocked out his memory banks, thanks to divine intervention.

I asked humbly: “How’d you get into such an honorable high position?” Oh, he replied, “I married Etsuko - remember her?” Did I remember squat, nasty and amazingly ugly Etsu? She had a huge crush on me and demanded I marry her when we graduated. It was not that she had any sexual inclinations but it was only that her father - back then second in command of the gang, wanted the nuptial because of my American passport - in order to set up Yakuza operations in Honolulu and Los Angeles. It is amazing how the opportunity to make heaps of money can transform a sworn enemy into your father-in-law.

How’d I get out of that terminal affair? After sly consideration, I walked into our schoolmaster’s office after school and knocked quietly. Without ever looking up, Brother Charles kept working on the school’s financial books. “What do you want?” “Sir, if it at all possible I need to skip one grade to graduate a year early.” The good monk had been a pastor to Hitler’s German Army expedition to Nanjing to fight the Japanese invasion of China in WWII (due to the Fuhrer’s serious grudge over Tokyo’s seizure of Germany’s colonies in China and the Pacific islands). His answer, revealing his masterful skills at espionage, was: “You may have what you wish.” With a sigh of relief, I was out of gangland’s clutches. And now thanks to the quake, I had stumbled onto her next choice of loyal husband to seek his help. Life is like shaving with a straight razor: You can shave off the irritating beard stubble and meanwhile cut your own throat.

So with the drunkard “Yak” assigned as our guide, we toured the oldest and most prestigious areas of the Port of Kobe called Kitano-cho (North district, which was up against the slope) - the old foreign merchant’s quarters. First, we stopped off at Mrs. Shueki’s magnificent three-story home. Her son told us she was in the hospital for shock and a slight injury. He gave us a tour inside, and we reminisced about how our Marist boys’ chorus (of which I was an alto singer) ended our Christmas caroling along those streets for a huge candle-lit party at their family home with all sorts of desserts and decorations - along with the less-than-attractive girls from Stella Maris school. The Shueki family were Syrian Christians who were among the earliest converts of the first Disciples following the crucifixion.

Later, farther uphill we stopped by the Kobe Club, a hangout for foreigners, where the then young Mrs. Morozoff, the wife of my soccer captain and heir of that White Russian family’s bakery and famous piroshki shop, had organized the club's interior and its grounds as the city’s largest emergency center with food, refreshments and first aid for all comers regardless of race, background or economic status. I was saddened to hear that Valentine had been suffering a terrible disease for many years and confined to their home. Crooked Japanese partners had ripped off his mother for title to the original Morozoff chocolate brand, leaving the family to run a small piroshki (buns stuffed with ground meat) shop.

The Dark Secret

The darker secret of the Kobe Athletic and Regatta Club was its wartime role as the center for The World Nazi Movement following the Allied victory over Hitler Germany. Advanced German fighter aircraft – including the elusive flying saucers and advanced fighter-jet designs were smuggled aboard submarines to the safety of that deep-water port. During the war, Kawasaki Aircraft in the southwestern suburbs hosted the world’s most brilliant aircraft designer Richard Vogt of Dornier Aircraft – who designed the nuclear-powered bomber. My stepfather who was involved in the Pentagon's search and recovery of those astounding planes used me as a decoy on long drives through the surrounding countryside in search of secret silos and tunnels used to hide the futuristic aircraft. If villagers came rushing toward his Buick, he’s tell them “I’m driving my stepson to see his grandmother.” – which always succeeded in convincing the peasants that he was a fine honorable American rather than an enemy hunter in pursuit of military secrets. Every recent discovery of a puzzling advanced aircrat was packed in crates and sent by military cargo planes to “the other Edwards Air base” in Area 51 and other remote sites.or to White Sands/Roswell plus several other isolated landing fields in that desert region.

One of the darker secrets of that war era was how the influential (German) Jewish leaders served as money-launderers for the Nazi regime in exile, banking the millions in cash in Osaka banks, Shanghai and Canada. Several of the children of those Nazi-facilitating Jews attended our Catholic school rather than enroll in the liberal Canadian Academy, a center for Allied intel. Many of those compromised Jewish children of Nazi collaborators/launderers went to college in the USA t o become part of the elite Jewish plutocrats in the Wall Street stock market and also at advertising firms on Madison Avenue. There was more to Kobe than met the eyes of television crews on a pity party.

Nights of Rape

As night fell, we bid adieu to our guide and proceeded down rubble-strewn streets on the long walk back toward the distant station while being rudely shouted at by the police. Ken split off to visit his family members in town, whereas I had less than two days to meet the Weekly’s print-shop deadline. Along the way in the darkness I encountered a group of residents standing around an outdoors fire. They entrusted me with recollections of their horrifying ordeal of buildings collapsing and catching on fire, emphasizing the selfishness of residents who failed to rescue an old lady being crushed under the rubble, and the night-time visitations by gangsters who raped young girls along the streets. Being accustomed to American norms of vigilance and community spirit, I urged them to organize a posse to run 24-hour shifts for neighborhood watch and to wield long wooden staves to whack any intruding thieves and would-be rapists. “And if you catch a rapist, break his fingers and kick him in the nuts before sending him crying home to Osaka!” They immediately took that advice to heart from a “Yankee” (in the Japanese context that indicated a mean and ruthless SOB “cowboy”) - which in normal times I’d object to, being called, even if it was a fairly accurate description of my belligerence in those days.) As I faded into the absolute darkness, I shouted: ”Too bad I can’t stay to bust a few heads” - which evoked cheerful laughter.

Arriving at the distant station just before sunrise, where I boxed in the railway man, I boarded the first morning train and on arrival to Tokyo immediately began writing the report and had my on-site photos developed. The two most gripping pictures were of a pancake-flat traditional wooden house in the very district of Tanizaki’s “Makioka Sisters” novel where a hand-drawn sign indicated: “Our family is saddened to report that little Yukiko died when the house collapsed.” The most popular of all the photos was a sad little puppy curled up in the rubble. Hundreds of people asked for the contact info for adoption, but sadly that entire block had been obliterated along with all its residents, cats and parakeets. The mutt was a goner. Life and quakes are cruel indeed

Needless to say, the real story of cruelty and kindness amid disaster was a huge hit, with popular demand forcing a massive second run, which was sent down to a distressed Kobe population seeking a truthful account of their plight. The city government reacted with venom, which my boss said to ignore while he ran a full-page apology to appease the urban fathers. Soon thereafter the mayor suffered a stroke - which was his own damned fault and not mine for certain. As the saying goes in Japan: “No good deed goes unpunished” and my onsite report qualified that cynicism with: “Nor do bad intentions.”

Human tragedy unbearable to suffer - along with bureaucratic insensitivity - comprise the story of most such disasters that befall entire communities around the planet, and elite cultural sophisticated Kobe was no exception. Now to get to the uglier details. The two most heinous crimes (other than the inhumane arson of underclass Nagata-ku) related to the most probable trigger for the Kobe quake, were first the weird experiments with Soviet-era “molecule dissolving” technology at Kobe Steel works - involving Shinzo Abe (who would later become Prime Minister) and his peon Hideo Murai, the chief scientists for the Aum Shinrikyo subway-gassing cult. And second the scientifically evidenced anti-gravity wave satellite that hovered over the city for the six months prior to the quake.

Magnetic Waves over Kobe

For the follow-up weekly edition, I phoned a geophysicist at Tsukuba (technical) University east of Tokyo to obtain further clarification about his spotting of a powerful electromagnetic beam directly focused on Kobe during the six months preceding the earthquake. On initial detection months before the quake, the beam was slowly moving from city center toward the huge and fairly new steel bridge that connected the western edge of Kobe to Awaji Island (which btw was the home of bunraku puppet-theater). Immediately following the mega-quake, the beam vanished.

The second part of this investigation of the science of artificial quake generation involved the Kobe Steel docks along the industrial waterfront. At the time, Shinzo Abe (the prime minister of late who died of gunshot wounds) was an overseer of new technologies for that steel company. His chief researcher was Hideo Murai, who would later emerge as the science minister of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was later involved in the Tokyo subway gassing of 1995. As uncovered in my team’s probe, Abe via his diplomat father was able to obtain a “steel-dissolving” device from the Yeltsin government in post-communist Russia. By focusing its beam on a steel object, the metal would disintegrate into sand-like particles. In a reverse process, the iron sand could be molded into any shape. Perhaps the most telling clue is that the entire research building at Kobe Steel vanished into thin air at the time of the quake.

Then comes the little-known disruptive event: The Awagi bridge collapsed on the edge of that island. The closest large structure was a mysterious skyscraper where the CIA compiled the lists of every citizen of China and Russia in its huge computers. Awaji was deed the safest site in East Asia for this sort of high-tech espionage operation. If that was the actual target behind the Great Kansai Earthquake, more than 6,000 lives of Japanese citizens and uncounted more Koreans and buraku-min, were sacrificed for a bonehead spy operation that should have been housed in Alaska or one of the outlying Hawaiian islands aka U.S. territory. This root cause was due to the same American hubris that led to the Vietnam disaster. Why Kobe? Because of its excellent school system, where Japanese students were well-versed in both Chinese script and the English language. Japanese are trained - brainwashed - not to rat out their superiors.

There’s one other atrocity - minor by comparison to the others - that marred the rescue effort. A huge overhead highway collapsed sideways killing a lot of motorists. The city fathers ordered the removal of concrete as the highest priority while residents were still trapped in burning houses and collapsed office buildings. The reason is that the broken pillar that began the chain-reaction highway collapse contained the corpse of a “tate-ningyo” - which literally translates as a standing-“doll” meaning a live human totem. It was a custom in old China and Japan until even after World War II to put a still living man into the main support beams of bridges, large buildings and in this case the raised highway as the “protector” the structure from evil spirits. Thus the remains of that body and various organs and blood flow were carefully removed in secret by the city government. Ancient superstition dies all too slowly.

Some good came of our critical reporting. The city government extended full-reconstruction costs for destroyed school buildings - except for the North Korean, Chinese and my Catholic schools. Our reporting on the plight of the foreign students and faculty resulted in editorials by the Mainichi and Asahi national newspapers on equal treatment for all students, faculties and operations of schools. The national government based in Tokyuo - socialist at the time and infuriated with their self-protective comrade politicians in Kobe - intervened to order state-sponsored repair of all educational facilities without exception.

What does it all mean for the rest of the world today? First, a truth-telling news media must not limit itself to reporting on tepid description of disasters but has the journalistic duty of advocating and indeed fighting for the public interest regardless of differences in race, class or background of the affected population. Since the 911 World Trade Center to the present wildfires in Southern California (along with the many other disasters of 2024-25), journalists must not reduce themselves to distant observers but serve the public as on-site eye-witnesses who must speak out for the despairing local population. “Objective Journalism” is total BS without compassion for the unfortunate victims and discussing their backgrounds and hard-times experiences. As far as I can see today’s “journalists” and media lords are the worst scoundrels and tellers of half-truths and propaganda since well before the glorious days of journalist Tom Paine who marched with George Washington’s troops in the Revolutionary War. We must get back to the difficult and sometimes horrifying facts on the ground in the interest of suffering people - that is our calling as journalists and sworn ethical duty.