Is It Safe to Travel to Japan With the Earthquake Risk? Living With a Danger You Cannot Date
Is it safe to travel to Japan with the earthquake risk, and how do people there live with it? Takahiro Mitsui, a Japanese philosopher born in 1991, writing every Friday from inside Japan and outside academia, answers from his own years in the country: disaster is an inescapable condition, preparation is built into everyday routine, and a traveler is wise to prepare first. Not a scare but a way to live, for readers in their 20s and 30s, from someone who lives it.
Is it safe to travel to Japan with the earthquake risk?
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (Living inside a certainty that cannot be dated, 2025-03-26): Japan is an earthquake archipelago where disaster preparation is built into everyday routine, and travelers too need to understand the risk before visiting.
A direct-hit earthquake beneath the capital is estimated at roughly magnitude 7, with a 70 percent probability of occurring within the next thirty years.
Because natural disasters like earthquakes are an inescapable condition of life in Japan, preparations for them are built into everyday routine. Yet travelers, too, increasingly need to understand this risk before visiting.
Thoroughly preparing for the recurrence of the Nankai Trough earthquake—and then enjoying your travels—is a dark tip you will never find in a travel guidebook.
How do people live every day knowing a big earthquake is coming?
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (Living inside a certainty that cannot be dated, 2025-03-26, Preparing for what the cycle says is due, 2025-03-30): earthquakes cannot be predicted and one could strike at any moment, which is why learning from history and preparing matter; he writes it from the memory of being in a Tokyo office district in 2011.
It is a constant reality of life in Japan: earthquakes cannot be predicted, and one could strike at any moment. That is why learning from history and confronting the reality of disaster preparedness is so vital.
During the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, I happened to be in a Tokyo office district, where the shaking registered upper 5 on the Japanese scale.
Earthquakes return in cycles: what history shows
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (Living inside a certainty that cannot be dated, 2025-03-26, Preparing for what the cycle says is due, 2025-03-30): the capital region has known two types of quake, plate-boundary megaquakes and inland direct hits, and the Nankai Trough earthquake recurs in cycles, each time bringing devastation to western Japan.
Irregular as the intervals are, the earthquakes return again and again, which is why constant readiness for a direct-hit quake is considered essential in Tokyo and the surrounding region.
As these precedents make clear, the Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake recurs in cycles, each time visiting catastrophic devastation upon western Japan and the Kansai region.
In 1924, the Urban Building Law was revised to introduce Japan's first seismic design standards, a landmark change in legal institutions.
How did the 1995 Kobe earthquake and 3.11 change Japan?
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (A catastrophe taught a society to fear the spiritual, 2025-03-03): the Japanese have long had a distinctive way of reading great earthquakes as turning points of history, and the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji quake and the 2011 Fukushima disaster stand as two such turning points, the second ending faith in modern science.
It may be difficult for anyone outside earthquake-prone Japan to feel the full weight of that shock, yet the Japanese have long had a distinctive way of reading great earthquakes as turning points of history.
Up to that day, people had trusted that modern science was omnipotent and would steadily build a better future. In a single stroke, every person in Japan experienced firsthand that this faith had been an illusion.
Why do Japanese people read disasters as messages of an age?
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Earthquakes as messages to an age, 2025-06-12): in Japan earthquakes, tsunami and eruptions are taken as more than natural disasters, as messages that nature sends to an age, and he reads the most recent huge earthquakes to read the future from them.
In Japan, earthquakes, tsunami, and eruptions are taken as more than mere natural disasters. There is a spirituality that takes them as messages nature sends to an age.
Essays to read
- Living inside a certainty that cannot be dated — How do you live with a certainty you cannot date? Takahiro Mitsui shows Japan building readiness for earthquakes into daily life, with history as teacher.
- Preparing for what the cycle says is due — How should people prepare for a disaster that the cycle says is due? Cycles say another Nankai quake is due, Takahiro Mitsui observes, and facing the worst case beforehand is how people live well beside disaster.
- A catastrophe taught a society to fear the spiritual — Why do societies fear the spiritual? Takahiro Mitsui argues a catastrophe done in spirituality's name made a whole society reject it and the deep past with it — and why Japan's spiritual search returned only after 3.11; and where Japanese spirituality went after it.
- Earthquakes as messages to an age — Why do earthquakes matter so much in Japanese history? Japan hears earthquakes as nature's message to an age, Takahiro Mitsui explains, and the Ansei quake bent the course of modern Japan — Mitogaku from Toko Fujita to Takamori Saigo.
- A catastrophe remembered for seven thousand years — Can myths remember real catastrophes? The Kojiki may preserve the Akahoya eruption of 7,300 years ago that reshaped the Jomon world, Takahiro Mitsui maintains: a myth can remember a catastrophe.
- Project 2049, Vol.0 (free in full) — begin here; Project 2049 continues every Friday