There had once been a science fiction novel that imagined what Japanese society would be like if Japan sank.
The novel proposed that a bacterium in the crust underwent abnormal reproduction, filling it with vast amounts of methane that acted as a lubricant between the rocks. This caused the lower crust to detach under delamination, and in just over 300 days, the Japanese archipelago would completely sink.
But now, the Gravity Bomb's effects were even more violent. The entire Tokyo area shook and split apart, Mount Fuji became active and was about to erupt, and its activity would soon trigger more than a hundred volcanoes across Japan into varying degrees of activity.
No one knew whether this crustal movement would cause Japan to sink, but once all the volcanic ash had fallen, vast stretches of Japanese cities would basically become uninhabitable.
If Japan had sunk in an orderly fashion, the Japanese authorities might have been able to handle it—they actually had considerable influence overseas, and they had always prepared contingency plans for disasters of this scale. They could conduct an orderly evacuation of "suitable people," and at least twenty million qualified people could survive.
But the problem was that this disaster had come so quickly that no one had time to react. Regardless of status or wealth, they were all trapped on the islands.
Most people in Japan had merely received evacuation notices before spending several hours in shelters.
Japanese society descended into chaos. The nationwide power supply rate was below ten percent, and the dim shelters were in uproar. The few Self-Defense Forces members could not maintain public order for long. Before long, Japanese people broke through the cordons and saw what lay outside—
It was true darkness. There were no streetlights, no moon or stars visible in the