[Thud]

The Japanese response to disaster was plain weird after the Kobe earthquake. All the ganjin followed pre-existing instructions and evacuated to pre-arranged shelters and assembly points. Few if any Japanese did. Instead they stayed in place, which included damaged and dangerously buckling apartment complexes, until the police came and ordered them to evacuate.

And shoddy Japanese building standards were revealed. They ignore their building codes. This was attributed to bribery of building inspectors.

[BurbankKarl]

I used to deal with a guy in Japan....he said there was no FEMA type response to Kobe....he kept saying how generous America was....comparing it to the Northridge quake one year earlier.