Scientists and government officials are worried that a huge earthquake could happen in the Nankai Trough, a huge fault line under the sea that runs for nearly 500 miles along Japan’s Pacific coast. Japan is nervous. The Japanese government currently predicts that there is a 75% to 82% chance that a big earthquake will impact this area in the next 30 years. Both average folks and experts are afraid of this possibility. It’s hard to picture how bad this disaster may be. Up to 300,000 people could die, largely from the quake and the wave that follows. The economy could lose up to $2 trillion.
In January, a government council put up a new catastrophic scenario based on these estimates. The stats are worse than they’ve ever been. Japan’s disaster preparedness strategy for 2014 aimed to minimize the number of possible deaths by 80% by making buildings safer and putting emergency plans in place. But new evaluations reveal that these initiatives might only lower the number of predicted deaths by 20% in the current situation. People are now calling for speedier action at all levels of society because of that news.
The government intends to develop additional evacuation infrastructure, build embankments that can survive tsunamis, and hold a lot more community disaster drills to help with this. Shigeru Ishiba, the Prime Minister, has asked everyone in the country to work together. He said, “Every minute of preparation now could mean hundreds of lives saved later.” He went on to remark that the most essential thing the government can do is preventing another tragedy like the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, which killed more than 15,000 people and sparked the Fukushima nuclear issue.
There have been a lot of earthquakes in the Nankai Trough. It has triggered severe earthquakes every 100 to 200 years for the last 1,400 years. The last huge break was in 1946, thus the area might be due for another big event shortly. In 2024, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) briefly warned that there was higher seismic activity in the area, but they later took it back because they didn’t have enough data. Still, fears have been high and are getting worse.
A viral manga graphic that came out earlier this year has people even more scared by predicting a major earthquake on July 5, 2025. Even though the comedy is clearly made up, it has had a big effect on how people act. A lot of people have been talking and worrying about this on social media, and several tourists, notably those from Hong Kong, have changed or canceled their plans to visit Japan this summer. The number of tourists coming from South Korea and mainland China, on the other hand, has kept going up. This shows that individuals in different sections of the area are reacting in different ways.
At a recent news conference, JMA director Ryoichi Nomura tried to calm people’s fears by saying that short-term earthquake prediction is still impossible, even though long-term probabilities are scientifically sound. He advised them not to worry and instead to become ready. He said, “No one can say for sure when or where a big earthquake will happen.”
The memory of the disaster in 2011 still motivates the government and the people, even though scientists don’t know what happened. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami that followed destroyed a lot of northeastern Japan, causing a humanitarian and nuclear calamity that took years to fix. Experts currently predict that a Nankai Trough quake of the same size or larger might do a lot more damage because it is close to vital industrial districts and densely populated coastal areas.
Japan has some of the best procedures in the world for being ready for disasters, yet it still has a big problem with this kind of threat. With time running out and the chances getting worse, the most important question right now is whether the government, communities, and people can work together quickly enough to stop what could be Japan’s biggest natural tragedy in modern history.
