When Hokkaido native Tatsushi Ueda landed a job at the Shizuoka Prefectural Government nearly 40 years ago, he was given a somber send-off that made him feel like he might never see home again.
It was 1983, a time when Shizuoka Prefecture was still abuzz over a research paper warning about the inevitable Tokai earthquake, or "the Big One."
"One of the first things people in Hokkaido asked me back then was, 'Can you survive the earthquake?,'" the press secretary for Shizuoka's crisis management office recalled in a recent interview. "They were seeing me off as if I were a soldier heading off to war."