Kobe Earthquake Impetus for Growth of Civil Society

According to Frank Schwartz, the most dramatic demonstration of the limitations of the state and the growing prominence of civil society came in 1995.

On January 17 that year, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck the Kobe-Osaka area, killing 6,430 people and forcing another 310,000 to evacuate their homes. (See photo above for partial devastation)

In his book The State of Civil Society in Japan, Schwartz noted that the disparity between public and private responses to the disaster could not have been starker.

"Despite the devastation, jurisdictional disputes and red tape paralyzed the government's relief efforts; dismayed by the disorganization of the government's efforts, about 1.3 million volunteers converged on the affected area and spontaneously organized themselves," Schwartz wrote.

Apart from emergency relief on the heels of the earthquake, official financial assistance did not go beyond low-interest loans and the provision of public housing.

As can be imagined, the spontaneous outpouring of voluntary efforts was widely reported by the media who inevitably compared the public and private responses to the catastrophe.

Indeed, even though the media had started paying attention to the importance of civil society prior to the earthquake, the catastrophe itself and the media attention it generated raised people's consciousness about the contributions that citizen or unincorporated groups could make.