When I ask people why they have done nothing yet, the answer is almost always the same: in the moment they would not know what to do. That is a plan problem, and it takes about one hour to fix.
Here is the shape of a family plan, in the order the problems actually arrive.
where is everyone
First question after the shaking stops: where is everyone? Phones will not work. The lines jam within minutes of a real quake, calls fail, texts queue up for hours. The standard advice, and it is good advice, is to pick one out-of-area contact, someone in another prefecture or at least far enough away that their local network is not the one collapsing. Your family sends a single short message to that person, and that person relays to everyone else. Out-of-area calls often connect when local ones do not. Write the number down. Put it in everyone’s phone under a name starting with AAA so it sorts to the top of the contact list, and put it on paper in every bag.
where do we meet
Second question: where do we meet? You need two meeting points, and they need to be different kinds of place. The first is near home, for the ordinary case where everyone is in the neighborhood: the park, the shrine gate, the school gate, somewhere open with no glass and no walls to fall on you. The second is further out, for the case where the neighborhood is off limits or someone cannot get back: the big station on the other side of the river, a relative’s house, a designated evacuation site. Everyone in the family should be able to name both from memory, and both should be places children can reach alone.
write it on a card
Third: write it down physically. A plan that lives in your head helps nobody when the shaking starts. I use a card, laminated in a cheap plastic sleeve, one per bag and one on the fridge. The card has the out-of-area number, both meeting points with addresses, the school or workplace names of everyone, blood types and allergies if relevant, and a line for anything else the family needs. Two minutes to read, no screen required, no battery. It is the cheapest item in our emergency bags and the one I would least want to be without.
practice it once
Fourth: practice it once. Keep it light: a conversation at dinner where you make everyone say the meeting points out loud, and one walk to each place on a weekend so the route is in your legs. Kids remember the routes their legs have learned. It takes twenty minutes and it doubles the odds the plan survives the first ten minutes of panic.
There is a version of this for people who live alone, which is most of my friends in Kanagawa: pick two people who will check on you, tell them they are those people, and give one of them a key or a way into your building. Same card in the bag, same meeting point logic, pointing at where you would go rather than who you would meet.
The plan does not need to be clever. It needs to be short enough that a frightened person can remember it, and specific enough that two people who cannot reach each other still end up in the same place. Decide it this month. Write the card on a Sunday. Then you can stop thinking about it, which is the whole point.
