Is Japanese Culture Traumatized By Centuries of Natural Disaster? - Facts So Romantic

"Nichiren Calming the Storm," a 19th century painting by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.Hulton Fine Art Collection/Getty Images

Ayumi Endo remembers the 2011 earthquake and tsunami with exquisite detail. She ran downstairs to screaming coworkers. The phones in Tokyo had stopped working, and the trains outside stopped running. To kill time, she went to a pub, and saw a tsunami chase a car on TV. The drama was seared into Ayumi's memory. "We all knew how terrible this was," she said. "It was like a movie scene."

Years later, 3/11, as it is informally known, has left deep grooves in Japan's collective psyche. The disaster caused an increase in suicides, PTSD, and stress-related physical ailments like cardiovascular disease. In Fukushima, the number of stress-related deaths—1,656—has topped deaths directly caused by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown combined.

As bad as they were, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami were just the latest chapter in a long, tragic narrative. The Japanese archipelago sits at the nexus of four tectonic plates, subjecting the region to more than 1,500 seismic events each year, including at least two 5.0 magnitude or higher earthquakes. As a result, Tokyo has been destroyed and rebuilt on average, from 1608…
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