27 Years

 Today is the 27th year since the Great Hanshin Earthquake.

A few months before this we had been in Kobe visiting Hisao's family.

I remember when the earthquake happened.  I use to have the TV on so I could listen to Japanese, at that time Mikey and David were little so I had no time to really study so listening was one way of picking up some words.  The quake hit early in the morning, at 5:46 am.  It registered at 7.3 on the Japanese Meteorological Agency scale.  Watching the news programs that morning I was shocked at the amount of damage that the quake caused.  I believed that Japanese structures were built to with stand strong earthquakes, I guess I was wrong.  One of the most famous photos was of a raised highway that had fallen over, another was the fires that broke out.  About 6434 people died in this earthquake.  At that time this was the biggest earthquake after the Tokyo earthquake in 1923.

One of my students lived in Kobe at that time.  She got so angry because her beautiful china tea set, that she had bought all the way from England, got broken.  She said that she had been so careful transporting from England just to have broken in her apartment!  But she was also grateful that she didn't get hurt and she could stay in her apartment.

This morning there was a memorial service for those who lost their lives in this disaster.  Even 27 years later it is still heart breaking for those families.