Born Then2011
Life during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 and caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Most of the dead were older people on the coast; about 150,000 people were evacuated around Fukushima.
Deaths: about 18,000–20,000 dead or missing.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Korean economic miracle 1962–1996
- Colombian armed conflict 1964–2016
- Migration to the Gulf 1973–2025
- China's reform and opening 1978–2015
- One-child policy 1980–2015
- HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern and eastern Africa 1985–2015
- Collapse of the Soviet Union 1991–1998
- Rwandan genocide 1994
- 1997 Asian financial crisis 1997–1999
- Second Congo War 1998–2003
- War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) 2001–2021
- Iraq War 2003–2011
- 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami 2004
- Mexican drug war 2006–2025
- 2008 financial crisis 2008–2010
- Syrian civil war 2011–2024
- 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami 2011
- Rohingya genocide 2016–2017
- COVID-19 pandemic 2020–2022
- Myanmar civil war since the 2021 coup 2021–2025
- Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022–2025