What is the outcome you're hoping for, though? It's not useful for people to live with vague anxiety. Are there specific solutions we want them to pursue, and that aren't being handled by the government?
All of these problems are known, but not funded, because who cares? Disaster management nerds? e.g the 2022 cascadia emergency exercise: https://mil.wa.gov/asset/6390e374e0f21
Anyway, the reason this stuff doesn't get enough funding is because the process of sorting out public spending priorities is called politics. Everybody has their own idea about what needs money and how much money should be thrown around. There's no objectively correct way to sort it all out, no means by which we can weigh the relative merits of increased library funding against retrofitting single family homes against earthquakes except by asking people which they prefer. And different people have different tolerance for risk, somebody who decided to tolerate the risk of a major earthquake sometime in the next X years because they'd rather fund some other project isn't necessarily wrong. It's not a matter of simply educating people about the risk (and FWIW, the average person in Seattle is definitely aware that the region is geologically risky.)
Not just that, but also to rethink how we reinforce them in major waterways or even minor but navigable waterways, if any heavy enough boat can just crash into a support column and take the whole thing down... albeit accidentally in that case.
Most modern bridges do take into account the possibility that there will be collisions. But it is also very hard to protect against a collision with an object that weighs 100k tons or more. By the time the boat is crashing into the bridge it’s too late. The solution is to design better systems around preventing things from getting to that point.
A good analogy is airport security. We are very bad at keeping weapons off planes. The TSA routinely fails to find knives and guns. The reason we haven’t had any more 9/11s isn’t because we made buildings airplane proof or because TSA doesn’t let box cutters through (they absolutely do). It’s because we learned to pre-empt coordinated well organized attacks using intelligence, and we hardened physical security at the cockpit door (I’m guessing mostly the latter).
You're forgetting the REAL reason airplanes are basically not hijacked anymore: Flight 93.
It used to be, if you threatened to blow up an airplane, the passengers would largely choose not to confront them, because the SOP of hijacking was to land somewhere and negotiate. Indeed this desire to not rock the boat actually turned one hijacking by drunk teens into a catastrophe when the hijackers were too stupid to understand that a plane couldn't just fly to Australia without picking up more fuel, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961.
9/11 changed that risk calculus for passengers. Now everybody knows what hijackers COULD do, and are willing to endure some danger to prevent that, to the point we've kind of overcorrected and people are yelling at and harassing fellow passengers for non-issues.
Except nuclear reactor backup systems </tongue in cheek>
It wouldn't make sense for every place to prepare as much as Japan for things that are less likely there than in Japan. Does Japan have as many tornado shelters as Kansas? Probably not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_and_tornado_...
I grew up on the edges of the New Madrid fault area and, while earthquakes were never discussed, we did tornado drills about every two months while in school. After I entered the workforce, that got closer to once a year, but you were still expected to have a plan and supplies. It was basic emergency preparedness, like any sensible person. Granted, big F5 tornados are rare, but small ones were common enough to not even be noteworthy.
Having left that region as an adult, it was a small culture shock meeting people who never had this kind of training. After all, the places I've visited all experience tornados, though not as often as my old home town. Still, the usual attitude I encounter is "I've never seen a tornado - they don't happen here". It's true that tornados don't happen often, just like my birthplace hasn't seen a serious earthquake in my lifetime, but they do happen.
I guess that's why I'm curious about your experiences. I've never been to Japan and I've read enviable reports of your disaster preparedness, but I honestly have no idea how your schools and culture handle tornados.
That said, it is very common and normal for people to keep emergency backpacks that they can grab and take to shelters if there's an evacuation. I have one in the closet next to my front door. The government also periodically gives out free emergency supplies for people to keep. There's publicized evacuation plans and routes, and places seem like they're prepared for big storms: subway stations for instance have huge doors at the entrances to protect against flooding.