The first days of January 1995 were calm and normal throughout most of Japan. The promise of a quiet year was shattered on January 17, when a devastating earthquake rocked the country. The power of the quake focused most of its destruction on the urban city of Kobe, which was the hardest hit by the quake. As National Geographic magazine reported later, The tremor lasted less than a minute. The resulting fires raged off and on for two days. The funerals went on for weeks. . . . Kobe's earthquake was the worst disaster to hit Japan since World War II. It killed 5,500 people, injured thousands more, and damaged 190,000 buildings. It toppled bridges, twisted highways, snapped ten-ton trucks like toothpicks, and severed the trunk line of Japan's famous bullet train, the technological pride of a high-tech superpower. It shut off water, gas, and electricity to nearly one million households and scrambled the underground...