Is Japanese Culture Traumatized By Centuries of Natural Disaster?

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, deaths directly caused by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown combined.