This kind of recovery, he says, takes time. “It’s different when a city is damaged than when a city is demolished.”

He compares what has happened in Japan to the big tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, where entire villages disappeared. In Japan, “whole urban complexes disappeared,” he explains. “There are many levels of recovery of many kinds of systems.”

Then there is the recovery of the individual.

The Japanese have a term called “Life Recovery,” he says, “which means recovery at the level of the individual, the family and the household to be viable in the new environment.”

Sometimes people have difficulty accepting that their environment—city, neighborhood and house—will never be the same, he explains. “They may talk for years and years about what it was like before and after [the disaster], but they can’t go back.”

Once people begin to internalize the reality of the situation, he says, “Life becomes more difficult, then easier. It’s a new normality. It can take six to eight weeks, or years.”

For a municipality, preparing for disasters means “spending money up to the level that you can, much like an insurance policy,” Alesch says. “You do that and it doesn’t take much money to protect yourself against modest events—the ones that happen 20 times a year in any particular place.”

On the other hand, “there are the ones that happen once in a lifetime or once every couple of lifetimes, which is what Japan had, and there’s really no way to protect against that,” he says..

What’s required for that type of event, he says, is long-term advance planning. “If you’re smart, what you try to do is not put dangerous things in dangerous places.”

Alesch uses the situation at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant as an example. “You need the water to cool nuclear power plants, but you don’t want to have to pump the water to higher locations. But it turns out that it’s cheaper to pump it a short distance than a long distance. And since that area was in a low-risk part of Japan, it probably made sense at the time.”

Overall, he says, Japan is “about as well prepared as any place for these kinds of events. A big part of this is cultural.”

He explains, “Japan is the only place I’ve seen where when the light changes, everybody starts out at the same speed. It’s a place where culture is shared widely and where the social rules are embedded in the culture.”

Despite the depth of the devastation, Alesch is confident Japan will recover. “If you look at New Orleans, it was a failure before [Hurricane Katrina]. Too many people, too few jobs. So their prospects for a recovery as a city system, within the New Orleans Parish, might be 20 years.”

In Japan, however, the population has shared goals, and he surmises that within 15 years they will be doing well.

The Japanese, he adds, are also good at dealing with family tragedy. “They’ll come back. And they’re stoic, they deal with it. Some places just can’t deal with it,” Alesch says.

Alesch’s book, the result of years of cumulative research in dozens of communities experiencing extreme events, is available through PERI, the Public Entity Risk Institute.