The recovery effort should be based on the idea that people are the backbone of a nation. It is vital to develop more human-centered legislation that recognizes both labor and housing as important parts of the foundation of society.

In the summer of 2004, while preparing a new book on the housing and employment situations in Kobe a decade after the 1995 earthquake, I paid a visit to the section of the Kobe District Court that deals with the auctioning of insolvent borrowers assets.

The bankruptcy court files on real estate auctions tell countless tales of shattered lives. In an area of town where the quake registered 7-the highest on the Japanese intensity scale, a rebuilt house, left empty when the family disappeared, was auctioned off. A vacant plot of land came under the hammer nine years after the deadly tremor destroyed the house standing on it.

A wave of corporate restructuring followed the quake disaster, explained a Kobe lawyer who specializes in personal bankruptcies. But people will do almost anything to hang onto their houses, even if it means borrowing from fringe lenders to continue repaying their housing loans. This almost inevitably leads to a hopeless situation and a despairing visit to the lawyer's office.

In the decade since the Great Hanshin Earthquake, Japan's traditional employment system has collapsed. In May 1995, four months after the quake, the Japan Federation of Employers Associations (Nikkeiren, currently Nippon Keidanren) announced its proposals for ``Japanese-style Management in a New Era,'' stressing the need to sharply reduce the number of permanent workers.

In the ensuing years, a series of deregulatory revisions in labor legislation, including the labor standard law and the worker dispatch law, have made it much easier for employers to increase workers with limited-time contracts such as temporary and contract employees.

Comparing the employment data for 1995 with the latest figures for 2003 clearly shows significant structural changes in employment in this country. During this period, the number of full-time workers declined by 1.11 million, while the ranks of temporary workers grew by 1.82 million.

A decline in long-term jobs inevitably increases the number of people who fail to pay off their housing loans. As a consequence of this trend, the number of people who filed for personal bankruptcy surpassed 250,000 in 2003, a new record.

The pain of the deteriorating job situation has been felt more strongly in quake-ravaged Kobe than in other parts of the nation. Nationally, the number of personal bankruptcies increased 4.2-fold between 1996 and 2003, but the number for Kobe posted a 6.5-fold jump.

Following the devastation, the Housing Loan Corp., a government-backed mortgage supplier, provided low-interest recovery-supporting loans for people pummeled by the disaster.

But the number of such loans that eventually soured and had to be paid off by the Housing Loan Guarantee Corporation, a guarantor for the loans supplied by the housing corporation, reached 253 in fiscal 2001 and rose further to 289 in fiscal 2002.

Despite the preferential terms of the loans, many borrowers have found themselves unable to pay off their loans amid declining job security, which has shaken the foundation of people's lives.

``A,'' a company employee, is one of the many Kobe citizens struggling to keep up with loan payments in the new job climate. In those few minutes of violent shaking, his house was lost. Just after he rebuilt the house with an additional loan, his company launched a serious restructuring drive. Pay cuts have made the burden of loan payments heavier for him while job cuts have increased his workload. Now he has to work overtime almost every day. By knocking down elevated highways and exposing the shocking fragility of many buildings, the epic 1995 earthquake shattered the sense of security among Japanese. It demolished the long-held belief that owning a house ensures a safe retirement.

On that winter morning, a large number of people in Kobe suddenly found themselves left without a home and still with a loan to pay off. They were unable to start from scratch. They had to start from minus.

While the temblor underscored the need for a more solid foundation to secure peace of mind, the collapse of the traditional employment system has only further undermined social stability. Now, 10 years after the destruction, the sense of security in Japan is still in ruins. For six straight years since 1998, the number of suicides has surpassed 30,000.

The challenge confronting the nation now is to rise from the ruins. The recovery effort should be based on the idea that people are the backbone of a nation. It is vital to develop more human-centered legislation that recognizes both labor and housing as important parts of the foundation of society.

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The author is a nonfiction writer. She contributed this comment to The Asahi Shimbun.(IHT/Asahi: January 27,2005)