The Nankai Trough is named as the source of a future earthquake considered near certain, though no one knows when it will occur. For Kido, that uncertainty makes the threat more than a distant forecast: it joins the possibility of urban devastation to his fear for his family and to memories of violence against Koreans.

The anticipated disaster

While reflecting on the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake and the massacre of Koreans that followed it, Kido considers the Nankai Trough among the places from which another major earthquake may come. A separate earthquake centered in the Tokyo region is also regarded as likely. Some people describe such disasters as potentially marking the end of Japan, but their timing remains unknown.

Local risks

The possibility feels concrete in Kido’s neighborhood, where people worry about collapsing buildings and tsunami damage. He imagines that being at home on the ninth floor might offer a chance of surviving a tsunami. By contrast, if he were playing with Sota at the waterfront in Yamashita Park when one struck, there might be no time to escape. The contrast between home and the exposed waterfront turns an abstract prediction into a question of where a father and child might be when the danger arrives.

Historical memory and personal fear

The Nankai Trough’s place in Kido’s thoughts is inseparable from the earlier earthquake’s aftermath. The coming centenary of the 1923 disaster makes him wonder whether, within another decade, frightened people might again take the anti-Korean cry “Death to Koreans!” seriously and attack his family. In that imagined future, his work as a lawyer and his identities as a father, music lover, and “good person” would offer no protection; those qualities might even intensify his attackers’ hatred.

Kido tries to dismiss these thoughts as excessive, but cannot readily regain a cheerful expression. He has consulted records of the earlier earthquake and knows that documented prosecutions covered fifty-three cases involving the murder of Koreans, while the Ministry of Justice then counted 233 deaths. Estimates of the actual toll vary, and may be several times higher; Chinese people were also killed. The expected earthquake thus opens onto a history of violence that Kido fears could recur, linking seismic uncertainty to the vulnerability of his family as a Zainichi household.