The thing most people don't mention is that after the March 11th 2011 earthquake, we had daily aftershocks, the kind you could easily feel, which lasted for months. Seems to happen mostly at night, most disconcertingly, as I was woken up out of bed more times than I could count with ones large enough to cause me to jump up and think the "big one" was hitting Tokyo.

Took me a good year, and moving out of Japan, to calm down about it and realize just how much daily stress it had caused me, how much on edge you are after something like this. Of course, nothing happened, but when your system is constantly in heightened awareness mode, the way I expect soldiers in a warzone feel wondering if there's someone around the corner waiting to get you, you start to build up PTSD in a real way.

Side note: add in a bit of nuclear fallout concern, plus having young kids and some playgrounds in Tokyo getting abnormally high enough readings they had to close them... oh, in addition to tainted food supply, and you'll maybe understand.