Emergency Preparedness in Japan

Since I've been living in Japan, I've become much more aware of the need to be prepared in the event of a natural disaster. The fact that Japan is one of the most earthquake prone regions in the world, as well as being subject to things like floods and typhoons, it makes sense to have an emergency preparedness kit at the ready. The hope is obviously that we'll never have to use it, but there's some peace of mind in knowing that you do have supplies available if need be. 

Some of our emergency preparedness kit supplies. Always better to be safe than sorry in our opinion!

Most of the stuff we have is American branded, from when we lived on a military base here in Japan, but I have no doubt that there are a whole host of Japanese equivalents - I actually need to research this a bit further so that we can update our kit.

We have lights (torches are in another spot in our house!), ponchos, whistles, 550 cord, stuff to purify water if we really had to, general first aid kit supplies and more - this is just part of it (we have emergency food and water stashes, too!). We have it all packed in a rucksack style sports bag so that if we really needed to just grab it and go, we could. I do actually need to go through our food supplies at some point soon and make sure everything we have is still in date - but I feel pretty confident that if something dire was to happen, we'd at least have some basics if the power went out or if we didn't have drinking water for a period of time. 

How about you - do you have an emergency preparedness kit ready to go in the event that a natural disaster happens? Any stuff that you'd recommend adding in? If you have an emergency preparedness kit, have you ever had to use it during your time as an expat in Japan?