To get some perspective on the earthquake that struck the country to which I moved last year, I hiked a mile and a half Wednesday morning from our house to the Great Buddha of Kamakura, the most famous attraction of this town on the southwest outskirts of Tokyo.

Serenity washes over me every time I gaze at the 44-foot, 13th-century bronze statue. I’m not spiritual, much less a Buddhist. But I went to confirm, with my own eyes, that the Buddha looks the same as usual — that he wasn’t, say, glowing because of deadly rays emitting from the crippled nuclear plants 200 miles to the north.

Silly? Of course. Not much sillier, though, than many of the reactions I’ve seen or read about in the past couple of days: the hordes of expats shelling out thousands for flights out of the country; authorities in China, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere screening Japanese food imports for radioactivity; folks in the States clamoring for potassium iodide pills to protect them against atomic particles wafting across the Pacific. I’ve been deluged with messages from loved ones, wondering whether we’re planning to evacuate. Yet while the concern has been touching, we’re staying put.

Particularly because we don’t live in the immediate vicinity of the nuclear plants, we’re confident that we’re as safe here as always — which is to say, extremely safe, the kind of safe that makes us comfortable sending our fourth-grader on a long train and bus commute to school, a fairly common routine here even for much younger children. Aftershocks, power outages, panic food-buying, long gasoline lines — this, too, will pass, and it’s hard to pity ourselves much given the misery that people along Japan’s northeast coast have endured since March 11.

If there is anything to worry about, it is that the perception of Japan as an unsafe country will inflict all kinds of economic and psychological damage. That would compound the tragedy it is enduring, hamper its ability to recover and elevate the challenges it faces just when it is most in need of support.

To read the rest of the op ed, please follow this link to The Washington Post.

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