The Household Earthquake-Preparedness Kit
A household earthquake kit is three days of water, food, and gear that lets your family shelter at home or walk out the door on short notice. Official guidance sets three days as the minimum and one week as the target for large disasters.12
Procedures, fees, and requirements can change. Confirm current details at the Cabinet Office disaster-prevention pages and your municipality's guidance.
Overview
The kit has three piles: water and food in official quantities, core gear for light and information, and documents plus cash plus medicine in a waterproof bag. Store it in two places: a go-bag near the door and supplementary stock at home.13
Buy food you already eat and rotate it through everyday meals. The government explicitly recommends this rolling-stock approach over closets full of unfamiliar emergency rations.1
Water and food: the quantities
Plan on 3 liters of drinking and cooking water per person per day.12 For two adults over three days that is 18 liters; scale the math to your household and stretch toward a week where storage allows.2
Water for flushing and washing sits outside that figure. Keep a polyethylene tank of tap water, or simply keep the bathtub filled, while remembering that small children and a full tub need supervision.1
Food means 3 meals per person per day: rice (including pre-cooked alpha rice), canned goods, dried foods, and biscuits.3 If home is far from work or school, keep about three days of supplies there too, covering water, food, one blanket or thermal sheet per person, a portable toilet, and hygiene goods.3
When tap water stops, every washed dish spends stored water. Food wrap over plates plus wet wipes for hands stretches the water math by days.2
The core kit, item by item
| Item | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Drinking water, 3L per person per day | Drinking and cooking for 3 days minimum1 |
| Shelf-stable food, 3 meals per person per day | Eating without gas or power3 |
| Battery-powered portable radio | Emergency broadcasts when networks fail3 |
| Flashlight plus spare batteries | Light without grid power3 |
| First-aid kit and emergency medicines | Injuries before help arrives3 |
| Blanket or thermal sheet, one per person | Warmth in unheated rooms3 |
| Portable toilet, tissues, hygiene goods | Sanitation without flush water2 |
| Mobile battery pack | Phone alive for alerts and contact3 |
| Work gloves, dust mask, plastic bags, multitool | Cleanup and improvised repairs |
| Glasses or contacts, spare pair | Vision if yours break or wash away |
| Comfortable shoes and clothes | Walking out over debris |
| Paper contact list and family photos | Reaching family with a dead phone |
The table's quantities follow official guidance current at writing; confirm the latest lists with the Cabinet Office pages since recommended items are revised over time.13
Documents, cash, and medicine
Pack a waterproof bag with your 在留カード (zairyū kādo, "residence card"), passport, health insurance card, and key financial documents.3 Add a week of prescription medications and copies of the prescriptions themselves.
Carry cash. ATMs and card terminals can stay dark for days after a major quake, and the shops that reopen first take notes and coins.1
Store it in two places
Keep the go-bag packed near the door: documents, cash, medicine, radio, flashlight, battery pack, water, and one day of food. Everything else lives as home stock under the bed or in a closet for sheltering in place.1
The split covers both outcomes. Evacuation takes the bag; a cracked-but-standing apartment lives off the stock. Check both locations in the same refresh pass.3
What it costs and when to refresh
A complete basic kit runs about 10,000 to 20,000 JPY at general stores, large drugstores, and online disaster-goods specialists (as of September 2026; confirm current prices with the retailer). Start with water, food, light, and the radio; add the rest over a few shopping trips.
Refresh perishables about every 6 months and review the whole kit once a year.3 Tie the cycle to something unmissable: the equinoxes, daylight-saving weekends abroad, or your residence-cycle paperwork.
Batteries leak, food passes its date, and medicine loses potency with no visible signal. A kit without a refresh date is decoration.3
Find your municipal hazard map
Your kit keeps you alive; your hazard map tells you where to carry it. Every municipality publishes hazard maps marking flood, landslide, and tsunami zones plus designated shelters for its own neighborhoods.
Start at the national Hazard Map Portal run by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism at https://disaportal.gsi.go.jp/, which overlays national risk data on one map.4 Then follow the portal to your own municipality's published map and confirm your shelter and zone in advance, since boundaries are revised over time.4
Good to know
The bathtub is your second water tank
Drinking water gets the shopping-list glory, but flushing and washing consume far more volume. A routinely filled tub plus a polyethylene reserve covers the household-water side the 3-liter figure excludes.1
Cash, not cards, for the first days
Power loss takes down ATMs, registers, and recharge terminals together. Keep small denominations in the go-bag; exact change buys faster than large bills when sellers cannot make change.1
Expiry dates fail silently
Canned goods bulge, batteries corrode, and adhesive bandages dry out, all invisibly inside a packed bag. Unpack fully at each refresh, check every date, and replace anything within six months of expiry.3
See also
- Drugstore-Supermarket Overlap in Japan
- ATM Hours and the 7-Eleven (Seven Bank) Default
- Earthquake Insurance (Jishin Hoken)