By Nam Sang-so

``I can’t erase this vague feeling of anxiety. I worry about my future all the time.”

People seem to live in a world that makes everyone brood over the unknown. Salaried employees wake up in the morning and remind themselves again that they don’t really want to live like this; repeating boring work day after day but must continue to survive and barely feed their families. The pay is never enough and they don’t see any signs of promotion.

Young girls just out of college are endlessly pressured by their own concerns that they may not meet a Prince Charming who would provide economical and psychological safety and time is running out. ``Look around, almost every family has big or small problems. We have a 50 percent chance of getting divorced,” they worry.

``Am I going to die after living so long with this man, or woman, who I’m not sure if I really ever loved?” We are living in such an uncertain world now. And we are going to live much harsher society when we are awakened after the ``bubbles” have disappeared.

Young boys and girls these days are not only unwilling to marry but reluctant to become engaged in romance. The phenomenon may be interpreted as precautionary evolution to meet with a diminishing Korean society with a decreasing population, full of bad news.

The plane was landing at Tokyo airport so I put the tray back in the vertical position. I resumed writing this essay on my way back to Gimpo. I had attended an alumni meeting in Japan. Two ladies, stooped a little from age, were from temporary shelters in the Fukushima Prefecture out of the 30-kilometer radius of the radiation warning of the disabled Fukushima atomic power plant. They lost everything.

I refrained from asking about last year’s combined disasters as I noted they were reluctant to revisit hellish memories. Yet I knew they were concerned about the newly found Fossa Magna and faults running across the main island under Tokyo’s metropolis and Mt. Fuji areas.

Japanese seismologists are citing new data after last year’s earthquake that estimated magnitude quakes of 8 or 9 could occur within four years with a 70 percent possibility or a 50 percent potentiality within five years. I wanted to know how people could live calmly every day knowing the potential threats. By the way, Japanese youngsters walked much faster in the Sinjuku streets in Tokyo than Koreans do in Myeong-dong in Seoul.

It’s ``akirame” or resignation, my old friends said philosophically. ``The only thing we helpless human beings can do is to carve in our hearts that today might be the last day. We are living today as if we are going to die tomorrow. We’ve put ourselves in our proper place as the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and radiation disasters proved that the reality of life is so fragile.

``On top of that a high magnitude vertical earthquake under the Tokyo metropolis is forecast to occur, possibly before we die. Who knows, our life might end tomorrow. ``We had been assured that we’d be awarded if we worked faithfully.

“It was a fine world. Not anymore, it is an illusion and fantasy.” The elders continued, ``We live now at our best so that we’ll have no regrets if we disappear tomorrow. We have surrendered to our fate. Oh, we still love Japan.” We sang childhood songs together wearing bathrobes on the soft tatami floor of a country side spa, under which is a wiggling fault line.

I mused over the philosophical words of my poor friends and thought about my beautiful country of Korea until the plane gently touched down at Gimpo Airport.

The writer is a retired architect-specifications writer, who shuttles back and forth between Seoul and New Jersey. Email him at sangsonam@gmail.com.