The firefighter’s account of the Kobe earthquake changed this student’s life

KOBE – When Miyuki Hayakawa enrolled in her high school environment and disaster mitigation course here in 2002, she was not interested in the field.

Little did she know that he was about to enter a new chapter of her life.

The program was set up at Maiko Prefecture High School as the first course of its kind in the country after the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. The goal was to nurture people-led efforts to help local communities in the event of a disaster based on lessons learned from the event.

Hayakawa’s mother, 43, was one of the more than 6,400 victims killed in the powerful earthquake that struck Kobe and its surroundings in the early morning of January 17, 1995. She was a second-grader at the time.

Every time the anniversary of the disaster approached, I felt depressed. She didn’t want to know anything about earthquakes.

However, Hayakawa ended up attending the course because she was told she could study luxury as well. She thought that completing the course might help her get a job because she wanted to get a job right after graduating from high school.

She soon realized that she was wrong about her choice after all. She tells the head of the course, Seiji Sawa, almost every day that she wants to leave school.

But then one day, about a month into her freshman year, a former firefighter who led the rescue and recovery efforts in the 1995 earthquake visited her class to share experiences.

Shozo Fujii was the deputy chief of the city’s Tarumi Fire Station in Kobe at the time. He took part in operations in the city’s Nagata district, which caught fire.

Although Fuji, now 72, calmly recounted what he saw and ran into him in a storm, his hand suddenly started trembling as he held a microphone as he described his experiences at West Municipal Hospital.

“There was one person we couldn’t save,” he said.

When he arrived at the hospital that evening, Fujii was informed that several inpatients had been buried alive in the hospital’s fifth floor collapse.

He ordered his crew to break the wall with a rock drill to pull out patients trapped between beds under the rubble.

They rescued 41 patients, one by one, in the operation, which lasted about 1 a.m., but one person was still missing: a woman whose last name was Nagao, according to a list of patients provided by hospital officials.

A patient in the same room with Nagao said she had just left the room before the earthquake struck.

But the firefighters could not save more time in the hospital and rushed to their next location. The city was in dire straits and needed their immediate help.

The next day, he learned from a colleague that the woman’s body had been found. She turns out to be the only person the Fuji crew couldn’t save during the entire rescue mission.

Firefighters still called her name over and over again in his mind even many years after that day.

The bitter memories of not being able to save her flashed back, and he couldn’t hold back his tears in front of the class.

Hayakawa couldn’t believe what she was hearing and lowered her eyes.

She realized that the one who couldn’t save him was her mother.

“He’s the one who went to save my mother,” she muttered to her best friend seated next to her.

Hayakawa’s maiden name was Nagao and her mother’s name was Yumiko Nagao. Her mother was hospitalized at the time but was expected to go home temporarily that day.

Neither Fuji nor school officials had prior knowledge that the victim’s daughter was among the students. It was just a coincidence.

Hayakawa doesn’t remember much of the rest of the day because she was overwhelmed by what happened. She did not expect to hear the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death when Fuji came.

But she clearly remembers one thing: Fuji’s novel had a decisive influence on the course of her life, and that day was a turning point for her.

“I gave up on the idea of ​​dropping out of school,” she wrote in an essay during class.

She did not speak to Fuji while visiting the school and has not contacted him since.

But she was relieved to know, at last, that there were people out there who did their best to save her mother until the last minute.

In her second year, she described her experience with the disaster for the first time publicly at the request of her teacher.

It was something she couldn’t do for many years despite knowing the importance of sharing her story so that others could learn from her.

Hayakawa, now 34, has made connections with other children who lost relatives in the disaster, as well as with support groups.

After graduating from high school, Hayakawa traveled to communities devastated by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in northeastern Japan and to those devastated by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China to recount her experiences.

She got married in 2013 and has three children. This year, her eldest child, a 7-year-old boy named Tsunago, will be in the same class she was in when the Great Hanshin Earthquake struck.

Hayakawa said she was ready to tell him what she went through on that fateful day 27 years ago on January 17.

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