Edition: U.S. / Global

QUAKE IN JAPAN: ONE NEIGHBORHOOD; In Kobe, Families Keep Sad Vigils In the Ruins Where Loved Ones Lie

Published: January 20, 1995

Kaori Matsuoka stared at the small vase of flowers and the rice cakes at her side as she huddled with her two boys where her house once stood, now an expanse of gray and red rubble.

She remembered telling her 13-year-old son to put on two pairs of socks to guard against broken glass when he crept out of his crushed bed after the earthquake, and she remembered hearing her husband rush after her older son as he screamed for help.

From downstairs her mother, sleeping with her father, cried out that she was all right, and Mrs. Matsuoka's husband pulled her from the debris.

But she never heard a word from her father.

In ruined homes, public shelters, grocery stores and cracked streets, the residents of this shattered city were all trying to come to grips with their losses. Some clung to their families, some volunteered their services, while others simply wanted to tell the world about their pain.

"He was asleep and everything had fallen on top of him," Mrs. Matsuoka recalled on Thursday, her voice trembling, her cold fingers pulling at her cuffs. "I tried to get my father out, but a fire erupted nearby and everyone told me to get away or else it would be too late."

If her parents had lived alone in the house in the neighborhood called Higashi Nada-Ku, they would both have died in the earthquake, Mrs. Matsuoka said, and she pointed to her neighbor's house, now a level pile of debris. "The 72-year-old woman who lived alone there is somewhere in all that."

Then she motioned to the ground by the flower vase, sobbing: "My father is still here, too. I think I can see some bones, but I just can't make them all out."

She had come back each day since the quake to check on her father, but the smoldering coals from the fire that burned down five houses on this street made it impossible for her to get any closer than the sidewalk until Thursday.

"We have nothing left," she cried. "We have to do everything we can to start a new life again, but I have to deal with one problem at a time. And now what I have in mind is to bury my father's body and only after that can I figure out what we should do next."

The residents of Kobe are only beginning to grope their way through the corridors of shock. Even those whose own families had survived intact were touched by someone else's sorrow.

Toshiko Asa, 56, who with her husband rented a second-floor apartment from her friendly landlord below, enlisted help from her relatives to forage for her possessions, all lost in a deep and messy hole. But she knew she was far luckier than her landlord, whose name is Nakagawa.

"I don't even know what to say to him," she said softly, choking back her tears. "He lost his wife and son."

"I remember yelling, 'Help!' " she said. "I was calling for Mr. Nakagawa to help us. I didn't realize that his wife had died. Their 12-year-old son had bruises on him, and the mother was lying on top of him, as though she had been trying to protect him. They died instantly. We tried to massage them back to life, but it was too late."

The troops who came here as rescuers are still searching the debris for survivors, but it is corpses that they are finding.

"I've evacuated three people today -- all dead," said a 24-year-old soldier. "It's the first time I've ever had to do this kind of work. It's my duty. But I wish they'd all been alive instead."

The soldier was one of a team of 12, dressed in khaki outfits and helmets. They climbed under beams and over split dressers and fallen walls, and jumped over gaps in the floor. They sawed beams, shoveled debris and occasionally consulted with one another on extraction techniques.

Their task at the moment was to help Sachiko Morimoto and her two brothers. Mrs. Morimoto, a thin 18-year-old covered with blankets to guard against the cold, leaned against a fragment of chair, waiting for a word from the soldiers, who were searching for her mother, almost certainly dead in the jumble of broken plaster walls, pillars, splintered wood and torn belongings that used to be a home. Her brothers, who lived in the house and had also been trapped for the first few hours, had been looking for their mother since the earthquake struck Tuesday. The soldiers arrived today to help.

"I was crying at the beginning," Mrs. Morimoto said, putting her hand on a tuft of blanket that covered her year-old boy. "But now all I want is to see my mother, to find her. I think that as long as my mother is breathing, she'll be all right."

The soldiers emerged empty-handed, however, without saying anything to the family. Mrs. Morimoto and her brothers hardly glanced at the soldiers, assuming they were taking a break from their exhausting work.

Before the soldiers arrived, the neighbors had all helped in the search, setting up a "digging team" who used their hands or whatever tools they could find.

"The army can't get to everyone," said Ishioka Tomotaka, 53, a businessman. "So we have a civilian crew." Mr. Tomotaka's entire house was bounced into the road, about 10 feet away, crushed and unsalvage able. He and his wife had moved to the local school, now a shelter for a few thousand people.

Blankets and food were finally reaching many of the shelters today and people waited calmly in the freezing cold for a couple of hours to get wool blankets.

At the Fukuike Elementary School, more than 500 people lined up in the yard on Thursday evening to get one blanket per family. While the distribution of supplies was orderly, the atmosphere in the shelters was part macabre, part pandemonium. Children scurried back and forth outside classrooms where the bodies of the dead lay on desks under futons.

"We have 19 of them here," said Koichiro Taka, a volunteer manager at the school, referring to the corpses. "We can't let the people in this area leave the bodies in the demolished houses, so they are brought here. There were more, but we just couldn't keep them all."

Most classrooms in the school were occupied by the nearly 2,000 refugees, who had brought whatever valuables they could rescue from rubble.

Mr. Taka insisted that there had been no theft except for one case when a man drank another's sake.

Because the buildings are potentially hazardous in the aftershocks, many grocery stores are selling their wares from tables out in front. At Seer Cooperative, a large discount grocery chain, purchases are rationed. Managers said there had been no looting.

Mitsuyoshi Sugi, the manager, looked out over the long line of people and shook his head. "We're Japanese, we live on an island and we are disciplined and taught differently," he said.

One thing everyone could identify with was fear of another quake. Aftershocks, which continued early this morning, frightened many, and radio reports about the possibility of another quake fanned anxieties and deterred many people from sleeping in homes that may still be safe.

"These aftershocks are terrifying now," said Kinue Nabeno, 62, as the floors of the shelter where she was staying shook. "I haven't gone through an experience like this since the Second World War."

Photos: A family was overcome with grief yesterday as they searched through the rubble for a loved one in Kobe. (Reuters); Among the inexplicable sights in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake was how a house ended up on top of a car on a rubble-strewn street. (Associated Press) Chart: "THE DETAILS" CASUALTIES -- 4,124 dead, 729 missing, more than 21,600 injured. BUILDINGS -- 30,400 destroyed or badly damaged, 275,000 people living in shelters. SHIPPING -- Kobe's port, which handles 12 percent of Japan's exports, closed except for emergency use. Ferry terminals closed. HIGHWAYS -- Hanshin Expressway, a major artery between Osaka and Kobe, collapsed in five places. Bay Coast Highway in Osaka collapsed on section of reclaimed land. Other national roads damaged at 20 sites. RAILROADS -- Lines for high-speed "bullet" trains damaged at 36 places over a length of about 56 miles. Railroad officials estimate it will take at least three months to repair track and bridges. AIRPORTS -- Kobe is served by Osaka Airport and Kansai International Airport, on a manmade island off Osaka. Neither suffered major damage, and service continues. ELECTRICITY -- 120,000 households without electricity because of damage to transmission lines or substations. GAS -- 849,500 households without gas because of damaged pipelines. WATER -- A million households without water. (Source: By The Associated Press) Diagram/Map: "A CLOSER LOOK: The Earthquake's Toll on One Street" illustrates a reporter's finding on a street in the Higashi Nada-Ku area of Kobe yesterday (view from above).