NO ONE KNOWS IF IT’S TIME TO PANIC
Compounding the confusion is the fact that the alert comes just as Japanese prepare to take off en masse for Obon, the unofficial summer holiday period when city dwellers typically return to their hometowns.
It’s another looming but incorporeal threat in a country that in the last week has faced the possibility of higher mortgage rates for the first time in over a decade, and a market crash and rebound that few have ever experienced
There will be plenty to talk about with relatives around the dinner table. Thoughts will return to the last major earthquake, which struck on New Year’s Day this January just as people were napping off holiday food comas.
No one quite knows if it’s time to panic just yet. For some, it was a good reminder to check on the status of emergency supplies and equipment. Others reacted with humour, with one wit online noting that since Google Maps allows reviews for the Nankai Trough, we should placate it with a series of five-star reviews.
Others still, like Robert Geller, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, believe any prediction is a waste of time, and distracts authorities from preparing for earthquakes that can’t be anticipated – a category into which all the country’s recent devastating disasters, from Kobe to 2011, have fallen.
One more serious risk is that of the boy who cried wolf. This alert is shocking; if nothing happens, will a future warning be ignored, even though the real danger might have dramatically increased? I am reminded of attitudes to a less natural threat – the North Korean missiles that sometimes fly over the country – which once stopped traffic and now tend to elicit yawns.
In all likelihood, the megaquake will not happen this time, and this episode will be forgotten. But for all the time we spend thinking of slow-moving problems – exercising to cut the risk of heart disease, reducing carbon emissions to curb climate change, creating a nest egg to weather that next recession – the alert is a reminder that nature doesn’t move to such timelines.
For residents in Japan, it’s a good opportunity to do what we can to be prepared and check evacuation routes. And for all of us, it’s a moment to think about the fragility of the world we’ve built, and how quickly it can be upended.
