2,500 'unknown' photos documenting Kobe's recovery from 1995 quake donated to university

KOBE, Hyogo -- During a period of 12 years after the Great Hanshin Earthquake devastated the region, an amateur photographer documented the changes that took place here, unbeknownst to even his family.

That photographer is 90-year-old Tsuneo Naruo, a retired company worker from Kobe's Tarumi Ward. In total, Naruo took around 2,500 photos, each organized by the date and location they were taken, in 10 volumes. Earlier this month, the volumes were donated to a university after Naruo's family learned of the photos and spoke with him about them.

On Jan. 17, 1995, Kobe was struck by an earthquake measuring a maximum of 7 on Japan's seismic intensity scale. At the time, Naruo was readying breakfast in the kitchen on the first floor of his home. Fortunately, he was spared of injury and his home was not damaged. He even began to commute to his workplace in Osaka, but the trains were not running.

Three days later, he witnessed the destruction that had taken place outside of JR Sannomiya Station. He felt shaken after learning that the scenery he was used to seeing during his commute looked completely different. Determined to leave a record of the scenes, Naruo bought a disposable camera and began to take pictures.

The arcade at Sannomiya Center Gai Shopping Street, which was a popular hangout for young people, had collapsed. Known as the "face of Sannomiya," the Sogo department store (now the location of Kobe Hankyu) was half-destroyed, with part of its exterior wall peeled off.

Naruo visited the devastated places on his days off, snapping photos and writing down the time, location and short comments for each. He covered as many as approximately 700 places including the cities of Kobe, Nishinomiya, and Ashiya. These included urban areas that were damaged to the point of being barely recognizable, residential areas that had been deserted, and commercial facilities that were being rebuilt. The same locations were photographed on multiple occasions, leaving a record on film of how the areas were changing over time.

Although Naruo had attended the memorial ceremony for the victims of the earthquake held at Kobe East Park every year, his now 81-year-old wife Haruko and 49-year-old daughter Megumi were not aware of his photography project. That changed in September 2021, when Naruo was being moved into an elderly care facility. As the two started to organize his belongings, they noticed a photo album sitting on a bookshelf. As Haruko started to flip through its pages, she began to cry. "Your father did something great," she said, "and I couldn't do anything to help."

Among the places Naruo photographed, some brought back fond family memories. Upon seeing photos of the half-destroyed Sogo department store, Megumi recalled, "We went shopping and eating there as a family. I felt so desolate at the time, it was as though the memories had also been destroyed." After finding a photo of the reconstructed building taken less than one and a half years later, Megumi smiled.

Naruo expressed his wishes for the photos to be used in ways such as preserving memories of the earthquake and for education in disaster management. Accordingly, on Jan. 11, the albums were donated to the Department of Social Studies of Disaster Management in the Faculty of Contemporary Social Studies at Kobe Gakuin University. Kiyokazu Maebayashi, the 65-year-old head of the department, expressed his appreciation of the photos, saying, "They have academic value as an extremely important collection of records taken (by Naruo) as he methodically visited the disaster-hit areas on a regular basis

(Japanese original by Yoshi Sekiya, Kobe Bureau)