Disaster is no stranger to residents of the Tohoku region
March 4, 2018 As reported by the Asahi Shimbun:
March 3 marked the 85th anniversary of the Sanriku Offshore Earthquake disaster that left more than 3,000 people dead or missing.
March 11 is the anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake that struck the same Pacific coastline in 2011, generating towering tsunami that left about 22,000 dead or missing.
The latter is also the start date for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe seven years ago, which is ongoing and has no end date (radioactive Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 have hazardous persistence lasting around 300 to 600 years -- 10 to 20 half-lives -- contaminants which have blanketed the region).
Of course, there are critics who pointed out the risk of building nuclear power plants in such a seismically active area in the first place. One such person is Harvey Wasserman, who warned, in joke form, at an anti-nuclear event held in South Bend, IN in 1997 that future generations would look back at Japanese atomic reactors as earthquake fault line markers.