So, this is quite a fascinating article. I recommend it.

The nightmare for Yoshiaki Kawata would start at midnight with a huge earthquake under the waters of Suruga Bay. Most people in the coastal cities of Fuji, Shizuoka and Hamamatsu in Japan’s Tokai region would be at home asleep as their homes begin to shake from tremors far stronger than those that struck the Tohoku region in 2011. Five minutes later, a 10m tsunami arrives.

“People in houses will be hurt by [the] shaking and then a tsunami coming,” says Mr Kawata, an earthquake expert and professor of safety science at Kansai University. Hundreds of thousands of people could die.

This is not an alarmist message from a university professor but the Japanese government’s official worst case scenario for a disaster it considers highly likely to occur within the next 30 years: an earthquake of between 8.0 and 9.0 magnitude in the tectonic plate boundary called the Nankai Trough. While the worst case is not the probable one, the government publicised the scenario in 2013, with Shinzo Abe, prime minister, calling on the Japanese people to be “calmly and appropriately afraid”.

ig.ft.com