Another weekend, another badly organised, short notice day trip; this week's luckless destination was Kobe. Not the first time that disaster has descended on the city, either.

On January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake devastated the the Southern Hyogo prefecture, of which Kobe is the principal city, leaving an estimated 5,500 dead and not doing the local architecture too many favours either.

Although today's bustling, vibrant city bears little outward sign of this catastrophe, there are plenty of memorials along the seafront to inform tourists of the events of that terrible day.

And by "inform," I mean "confuse the hell out of."

The Hanshin Earthquake measured 6.9 on the richter scale. To give this some context, the quake which devastated Iran at the end of last year measured 6.3 and killed an estimated 30,000 people. This section of street, with its torn concrete and warped lamp posts, has been preserved as a demonstration of the Earthquake's impact.

A rather more cryptic monument is the Wall Of Hands. As you can see from the bottom photo, someone at the brick yard was having a really bad day. This thing actually reminded me a lot of The Blair Witch Project. The bit at the end, where they go into the house: spooky.

Underneath the fountain is a chamber (lower photo) with thousands of names on the wall. We didn't know if these were of victims or of aid donors, as we couldn't decipher the "explanatory" plaque. My Japanese is currently just about good enough to order dinner. Provided that the waiter speaks some English.

At 5.46 am the earthquake struck, toppling the Marina clock and damaging the clock's mechanism. Although the statue has been resurrected, the time remains frozen at the point when the city awoke to a nightmare. Not two months after the Hanshin earthquake, the AUM Shinrikyo cult released sarin nerve gas onto the Tokyo subway, for which the cult leader has just been sentenced to death (nearly a decade later, appeal pending.) 1995 was a bit of a dark time for Japan.

It is no secret that Japan is prone to earthquakes; I was woken up by an earth tremor on my first night in this country. The combination of geological activity and densely populated cities mean that disaster is always a possibility. The worst quake on record is the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which levelled Tokyo and Yokohama and killed more than 140,000 people.

The tragic effect of the 1995 earthquake was exacerbated by the Japanese authorities' sluggish response. Offers of foreign aid were rejected and aid workers were allegedly turned away at the airports as they didn't fit any visa categories.

Japan will inevitably have to face this situation again at some point in the future. Hopefully, lessons will have been learnt from the Hanshin earthquake and its aftermath.