The city of Tokyo from Skytree, the world’s tallest broadcasting tower at 634 meters.
Photographer: Toru Hanai/BloombergWhat Japan’s Disaster-Proofing Strategies Can Teach the World
The country’s infrastructure is already one of the world’s safest, and investment in risk management is ramping up.
In Japan, planning for natural disasters is a serious business. For good reason.
Over the past decade, the island nation has weathered about 20% of the world’s “strong” earthquakes (magnitude 6 or greater) as well as multiple tropical storms a year. The worst of these events can be utterly devastating: The 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which triggered a massive tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, killed more than 15,000 people.