Japan is a major industrial powerhouse with a long history of earthquakes. So Fukuoka would have coped fine - right? Well - maybe....

First - let's not kid ourselves - in the event of a really major quake that does serious damage no city on earth can "cope". It is simply too devastating.

The real question is, how would Japan have coped, how quickly would aid have come, would overseas offers of help have been taken up as they were not after the Kobe quake - and how would those at the bottom of society - the poor, foreigners from the less fashionable countries, the visa-overstayers and the illegal workers - how would THEY have been treated, and cope, in an emergency?

That's an open question. We won't know until it happens. The government's response to the Niigata quake in 2004, and to Fukuoka's recent 'quake suggest that lessons were learned in the aftermath of Kobe. But that isn't to say that the most vulnerable groups would do much better today. In this issue we take you back to Kobe. This is how it WAS - and just possibly how it could have been here, had our the quake been a little worse.

Japan has changed in the past ten years - how much, we don't know. What Kobe taught me, and many others, was that after a major disaster we can't rely on help coming quickly - we may have to help ourselves...®