The short version
- Furniture anchors that require drilling into a wall can turn into a restoration charge at move-out; tension-rod (tsuppari-bō) and adhesive-mat anchors do the same job without a hole.
- Public disaster handbooks commonly cite roughly 3 liters of water per person per day, with food ideally stocked for about a week and at minimum three days — treat the exact number as a starting point to confirm with your own city, since guidance varies by municipality and gets revised.
- A basic emergency bag holds a flashlight, a portable radio, spare batteries, a power bank, a first-aid kit, cash in small bills, any regular medication, and copies of your key documents kept separately from the originals.
- Free multilingual apps and portals — Safety Tips, NHK World-Japan, and the Japan Meteorological Agency's multilingual site — cover the alerts a paper handbook can't push to your phone in real time.
- None of this is a safety guarantee. It's a starting shopping list built from public disaster-prevention sources, not a substitute for your city's own hazard map and evacuation plan.
Anti-tip furniture straps almost always ship with a diagram showing a drill. That's awkward if you rent, because a hole in a plaster wall is close to a textbook example of the kind of tenant-installed fixture a landlord can bill you for when you move out. The good news is that drilling isn't actually required to keep a bookshelf or a wardrobe from tipping over. It's just the default the packaging assumes, and it's aimed at homeowners who don't have to think about a security deposit.
Why "no wall damage" matters more here than elsewhere in this guide
Our security deposit guide walks through the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) guideline that Japanese landlords and tenants use to sort move-out charges into landlord-borne and tenant-borne categories. One of the tenant-borne categories in that guideline is exactly the problem here: holes or fixtures installed without the landlord's consent. A bracket screwed into a wall to stop a wardrobe from falling lands squarely in that category, deposit-wise, unless you asked first and got that consent in writing.
That's the whole reason this article exists as a separate guide instead of a footnote on a generic disaster-prep page. The standard advice — secure your furniture — is the same whether you own or rent. What changes for a renter is which anchoring method you reach for, and whether you ask your landlord or management company before you drill anything.
Furniture anchors that don't touch the wall
Two categories of anti-tip device are built specifically to avoid fasteners in the wall or ceiling, and both are widely sold in Japan under their own product names rather than a single common brand:
- Tension-rod poles (tsuppari-bō 突っ張り棒 / "anti-tip tension rods") — a spring- or screw-adjustable pole wedged vertically between the top of a tall piece of furniture and the ceiling. It holds the furniture in place through pressure alone, is fully removable, and typically has a rubber or foam pad at each end to protect the ceiling and the furniture finish.
- Adhesive-mat or adhesive-strap anchors — a gel pad or a strap-and-adhesive-plate pair that sits between the base or back of a piece of furniture and the floor or wall, relying on adhesion and friction rather than a screw. These generally come off cleanly, though some leave a faint residue that ordinary cleaning tends to remove; if you're worried, test a small area first.
Neither type is a drop-in replacement for a properly screwed wall bracket in every situation — a very tall, heavy, or top-loaded piece of furniture may need something sturdier, and the manufacturer's own weight and height limits are the number that actually governs whether a given device is rated for a given piece of furniture, not this article. Tokyo's own disaster handbook covers the general principle of securing large furniture and keeping heavy items low rather than on top shelves; see the Sources section below for the page. Where your furniture is heavy enough that only a wall-anchored bracket will hold it, that's the point to raise with your landlord or management company before you buy anything, not after you've already made a hole.
What a basic emergency bag holds
Public sources on this — Tokyo's handbook and the U.S. Embassy's own guidance for residents of Japan among them — converge on a similar short list rather than each inventing their own. None of it requires a Japanese bank account or a store visit that's hard to do in English:
- A flashlight, ideally hand-crank or with spare batteries on hand
- A portable battery radio, since networks and Wi-Fi can go down before the power does
- Spare batteries sized for whatever you actually own
- A portable phone charger or power bank
- A basic first-aid kit, plus a few days of any medication you take regularly
- Cash in small bills and coins — card readers and ATMs may not work right after a disaster
- A blanket or sleeping bag and basic rain gear
- Copies of key documents, kept somewhere other than the bag itself (more on this below)
This is a starting list, not an exhaustive one. Households with children, pets, or specific medical needs will have their own additions, and the public handbooks linked below go into more detail than fits in a single guide here.
Water and food: a number to start from, not to trust blindly
Tokyo's English-language disaster handbook gives a commonly cited figure: roughly 3 liters of water per person per day, with food ideally stocked for about a week and at minimum three days. That's a useful starting point, but it's Tokyo's own working number for a Tokyo-scale earthquake scenario, not a single nationwide legal minimum. Other prefectures' handbooks and the U.S. Embassy's guidance sometimes land on similar ranges without all citing one identical figure. Treat the exact quantity as something to confirm against your own city or ward's current disaster-preparedness page, since the number can be revised and can differ by municipality — this article isn't the authority on what your specific area currently recommends.
A rotation habit helps more than the exact liter count. Buying shelf-stable water and food once and never looking at it again means it may be past its best-by date by the time you'd actually need it. A simple fix many households use is stocking slightly more of what they already eat day to day and rotating the oldest cans or bottles into regular meals, replacing them as they're used.
Keeping track of your paperwork, without turning this into legal advice
Emergency-kit guidance from multiple public sources recommends keeping photocopies of key documents — passport, residence card, insurance card — somewhere separate from the originals, such as with a trusted contact, in a second bag kept outside the apartment, or scanned and stored securely. That's a general possession-management habit anyone might apply to important paperwork, not specific advice about how or when you're required to carry, present, or store your residence card under immigration law. If you have questions about your residence card's legal handling requirements, those go to the Immigration Services Agency of Japan, not a disaster-prep checklist.
Multilingual apps and where the alerts actually come from
A paper handbook can't push an alert to your phone the moment an earthquake early warning fires. A few free, official sources cover that gap in English and several other languages:
Official pages for the services named above:
- Safety tips (Japan Tourism Agency-supervised multilingual disaster alert app)
- NHK World-Japan (multilingual news and disaster alerts)
- Japan Meteorological Agency, multilingual disaster-risk information
Plain links, not affiliate links — this site has no commercial relationship with any of these three services. Confirm current language coverage and features directly with each one; app availability and supported languages can change.
Which of these to install is mostly a matter of preference. Safety Tips is built specifically for foreign residents and travelers and pushes short alerts; NHK World-Japan pairs alerts with broadcast news coverage; the JMA's own multilingual site is the primary source those apps draw from, so it's worth bookmarking even if you also install an app.
A shopping list, organized by the rental-specific catch
| Category | What to watch for as a renter |
|---|---|
| Furniture anti-tip device | Choose a tension-rod or adhesive-mat design over a screw-in wall bracket where the furniture's weight allows it; ask before drilling anything. |
| Drinking water and shelf-stable food | Rotate stock so it doesn't expire unused; confirm the current recommended quantity with your own city's page (figure varies, unconfirmed for your specific municipality). |
| Flashlight, radio, batteries, power bank | No rental-specific catch — pick charged or battery-powered per your own preference. |
| Go-bag documents and cash | Keep photocopies separate from originals; this is general document management, not immigration guidance. |
| Multilingual alert app | No rental-specific catch — install before you need it, since setup during an actual event is the worst time. |
This site is not yet part of any product affiliate program for the items above, so no specific brands or purchase links appear here — only categories. If that changes, any future product links would carry their own disclosure, separate from this general guide.
Where this connects
The tenant-borne and landlord-borne categories behind the "ask before you drill" advice above come from the same MLIT guideline covered in full in our security deposit guide — useful reading before you buy anything that involves a fastener. If you're furnishing a rented apartment from scratch rather than retrofitting one you already live in, our moving-in checklist covers the buy-versus-rent furniture decision that determines how much of this even applies — a rented wardrobe from a furniture-subscription service comes with its own question of whether you're allowed to anchor it at all, which is exactly the kind of thing to ask the rental provider before the tension rod goes up.
Sources
Checked 2026-07-26.
For the general principle of securing large furniture, keeping heavy items on lower shelves, and the commonly cited water and food stockpile figures, see the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's English-language disaster handbook, "Let's Get Prepared" (bousai.metro.tokyo.lg.jp). For emergency-kit contents and the advice to keep document copies and cash in small bills on hand, see the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Japan's page on emergency preparedness for U.S. citizens (jp.usembassy.gov), which is written for a general audience of foreign residents of Japan even though it is hosted by a single country's embassy. For the multilingual alert services named above, see the Japan Tourism Agency-supervised Safety tips app page (jnto.go.jp), NHK World-Japan's app page (nhk.or.jp), and the Japan Meteorological Agency's multilingual disaster-risk portal (jma.go.jp). The MLIT restoration guideline behind the tenant-borne "unauthorized fixture" category is sourced in full in our security deposit guide. Water and food quantities, exact device weight ratings, and supported app languages change over time and by municipality; confirm current figures directly with the sources above rather than relying on this page alone.