安心. Two characters. The first one means safe. The second one means heart. Put them together and you get anshin, which usually gets translated as peace of mind, and in English that sounds soft. Vague. Like something a meditation app promises you after three deep breaths.
In this blog it is the state you end up in after you have done the work. The water is in the closet. The shelf is bolted to the wall. Everyone in the family knows where to go and who to call. Anshin is what is left over when nothing is hanging over you.
what the ground reminds me
I live in Kanagawa, and the ground here reminds me of this on a regular basis. Twice this year the phone alarm has gone off in the middle of the night, that horrible descending tone, and the first few seconds are always the same: not knowing whether this is the small one or the big one. What settled me both times was knowing that the stuff was already done.
small boring jobs
That is the whole idea behind this site. Preparedness is a stack of small boring jobs, done in the right order, most of which cost under 3,000 yen and none of which require you to become a different person.
Fear is the wrong fuel. You can find plenty of content out there that runs on it, usually with a countdown clock in the corner and a link to buy freeze-dried food in bulk. Fear is useful for about a week, long enough to make you panic-buy things you will never use, and then it burns out and you stop entirely. Boring is the better fuel. Boring keeps going in February when nothing has happened for months and the flashlight batteries are not going to check themselves.
There is also a particular trap here: you do a bit of reading, feel overwhelmed, and decide that since you cannot do everything at once you will do nothing. I have been in that hole. The way out is to pick one small job, finish it today, and then pick another one next weekend. Three hours of total effort across a month covers the first three posts on this blog. That is a low bar on purpose.
the order matters
So what actually matters? Order matters. Water comes first, because you can survive weeks without food but only days without water, and because in Japan the pipes and the pump in the building are more fragile than people think. Light comes second, because half of what goes wrong after a quake happens in the dark. Then furniture that can fall on you. Then a family plan everyone has actually practiced. Then the papers and accounts, which are the quiet disaster that arrives without warning. Then, and only then, gear.
None of this is dramatic. Almost none of it is expensive. All of it is the kind of thing you finish once and then mostly maintain.
Anshin, in the end, is cheap. What it costs is an afternoon here and there, and a willingness to do unglamorous work while nothing is happening. I would rather spend those afternoons than the alternative. That is what this blog is for.
