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The seconds you get, and the three days after
The 緊急地震速報 has been a public service since 2007 and works on a simple fact: the first tremor travels faster than the one that does the damage, so a network of seismometers can detect the first and warn ahead of the second. What it buys you is seconds — ten, twenty, sometimes none at all if you are near the 震源 — and that is enough to get under a desk and away from glass, which is what it is for. It arrives on every phone in the affected area with a sound deliberately designed to be unpleasant, and it is sometimes wrong, and the official position is that you should act on it anyway. After the shaking, three systems take over. Your employer will send an 安否確認 message and you must reply, because unanswered names get escalated to phone calls and then to someone being sent to your flat. Your local school is the 避難所 and you should know which one before you need it — the address is on your city's hazard map and on a sign in the street. And the number three recurs: three days of water and 食料 is the standard advice for staying put, because that is roughly how long restoration takes, and since 2013 Tokyo has asked employers to keep staff and feed them for the same three days rather than send five million people into streets where the trains have stopped. That last rule was written out of what happened in 2011, when they did.