You wake to pitch blackness, the house shaking crazily. Nightmare? Yes — a waking one. "Where are my glasses?" You're helpless without your glasses. The shaking gets worse.

Earthquakes, typhoons, torrential rain, withering heat — this summer was a crash course in coping with natural onslaughts. The education is painful but necessary. Worse is to come — if not something unforeseen, then the very luridly foreseen Nankai Trough megaquake. Projections are legion: magnitude 9, 300,000 deaths, ¥1.4 quadrillion worth of damage, 4.3 million refugees; 70, 80 or 90 percent likely to happen within 30 years, with devastation radiating from an epicenter off southwestern Honshu through Nagoya, Chiba, Yokohama and Tokyo. Imagine, says Shukan Gendai magazine — sometimes it's the relatively small calamities that seize the imagination — 17,000 people stuck between floors in disabled elevators.

Elevators present twin terrors: being stuck in one and being stuck without one. If you live high up in a tall building, with the power down and the water off, your 19th-floor apartment can be a claustrophobic prison, as it was following September's Hokkaido quake for a Sapporo man Shukan Gendai spoke to. He's in his 40s and healthy. Trudging up and down 19 flights of stairs for food, bottled water and whatever other needs two days of utility paralysis generate was exhausting but tolerable. But if you're ill? Infirm? Old?