If the multiverse of Academy Award sensation "Everything Everywhere All at Once" exists, then in some alternate reality this scenario unfolded last week: Just as some traders feared, the Bank of Japan announces a surprise move to dismantle yield-curve control — on the same day as Silicon Valley Bank implodes.

Had Gov, Haruhiko Kuroda taken such a step, it would have compressed into a single weekend the mistakes of predecessors who raised rates at the wrong time. His comparatively tiny tweak in December roiled global markets for weeks; a surprise hawkish turn, just as SVB collapsed, would unleash chaos.

Fortunately, we live in this universe — one where Kuroda has exercised considerable prudence over tightening policy, despite the insistence from largely overseas investors that he abandon yield-curve control and join the global cycle.

Kuroda is right to be cautious. While Japan and Silicon Valley might have little else in common, one thing that unites them is a dependency on easy money. Assumptions at SVB went badly wrong when a generation of investors who had been successful while rates were near zero encountered something many had never seen before — a rapid series of interest rate hikes.

So it begs the question: What might happen in a country where money has been free for the best part of three decades — one where not just venture capitalists but households, and the government itself, are deeply dependent on money being cheap? It’s impossible to say which way the cards might fall, but considering how much of the assets of national and quasi-national institutions are tied up in government bonds, an SVB-like failure of a mid-sized bank might look mild by comparison.

Despite the considerable speculation — sometimes demands — that Kuroda significantly unwind his easy money stance through 2022, he was careful to avoid stepping into the trap that engulfed some prior governors who raised into a global downturn. After much hand-wringing and despite government opposition, the BOJ lifted its rate from zero in 2000, only to rescind the step the following year. Then-Gov. Masaru Hayami was never able to recover his standing after that fiasco. To his credit, the current governor-elect, Kazuo Ueda, was one of two dissenting votes at the time. When the BOJ next lifted rates it was on the eve of the global financial crisis. That didn’t end well, either.

How similar is the current landscape? SVB isn’t Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Global growth isn’t falling off a cliff, but is still slowing. The Federal Reserve has probably been chastened by the turbulence unleashed by SVB’s failure, but is still expected to proceed with a hike next week. In a nod to the desire for financial stability, a 50-basis-point step looks unlikely, however. A quarter-point nudge is a sensible compromise. Investors doubt the hawkish resolve of the European Central Bank. Although officials stress the fight against inflation isn’t won, the bulk of tightening is behind us.

Nonetheless, the notorious widow-maker trade of betting against Japanese government bonds will have claimed a few more victims since Friday, after the 10-year yield plummeted through the previous policy ceiling of 0.25% as traders reconsidered their Fed tightening bets (that’s assuming the shorts weren’t already squeezed out of the market by the BOJ itself.) The pressure has eased so much that the central bank could afford to cut the amount of bonds it offered to buy as part of yield-curve control on Wednesday, something hard to imagine just a week ago. SVB should serve as a warning to those no doubt already lining up to challenge the bank again.

SVB was an "unknown unknown” — it seems inconceivable that a reputable bank would be so unprepared to manage the duration of its assets and liabilities during an undeniably well-telegraphed tightening cycle, but it happened nonetheless. In Japan, too, there are the "known knowns” such as the 74% of mortgage holders who have variable rates or the tremendous amount of its national budget used to repay debt each year, but also variables that are much harder to predict. Chief among them is a generation of bankers who last saw 10-year rates above 2% a quarter-century ago.

Japan’s finance sector is likely better regulated than the U.S. is right now, after its own bitter experience of fixing bad loan issues throughout the 1990s and early 2000s — look how much better FTX clients have done than their U.S. peers, thanks to tighter controls. Nonetheless, there might yet be more SVB-sized landmines out there that even regulators are unaware of. Despite the side effects its policy may have, that famous Silicon Valley adage of moving fast and breaking things is not appropriate here.

Preparations for most central bank policy decisions begin a long time in advance. Many BOJ officials were probably as unaware of SVB as the rest of the world. Unlike Lehman or Bear Stearns Cos., SVB was not a name that had been on the front burner of even financial media until late last week. On a ferry ride early Saturday morning from Singapore to a golf tournament in Malaysia, a man looked up from his phone and asked loudly, to nobody and everybody: "What’s SVB?”

Donald Trump once berated Fed Chair Jerome Powell as a powerful golfer who couldn’t putt. Kuroda isn’t known as a golfer. But, by luck or judgment, the outgoing BOJ boss played a reasonable game over the course of a decade — and finished well. Time for Ueda to tee off.

Gearoid Reidy and Daniel Moss are Bloomberg Opinion columnists