Spoiler range: episodes 1–4. For episode 5 onward, I only mention the per-episode rating numbers and keep the plot under wraps.
1. The disaster-survival pace of the first three episodes is absurd
According to the official synopsis of Japan Sinks: 2020, the Mutou family survives a massive earthquake, escapes Tokyo, and gets cornered by an archipelago that is "sinking by the moment." So far, that's a standard disaster story.
But once you actually watch episodes 1–3, it feels a lot rougher than that.
Earthquake. Tsunami. Flooding. Cracks in the ground. Mountains. Wild boar. An unexploded bomb. Volcanic gas. Attacks by other people. And then a YouTuber drops in from the sky.
You get the full disaster course meal, and the show keeps adding human drama to your order without asking. They're looking for a safe place, but the map itself breaks a little more with every episode.
What's really scary is that there's almost no movie-style warning that a character is about to go. Someone is walking around normally, and in the next shot their life is over. In this show, the ground works faster than any death flag.
2. The reliable dad gets an unexploded bomb, the martial-arts woman gets poison gas: strengths don't protect anyone
The father, Koichiro Mutou, is described on the official profile as "resourceful and dependable," and his son Go looks up to him like a hero who can do anything. Sure enough, he finds food even in the mountains and is the survival guy of the group.
And then he digs up wild yams.
He hits an unexploded bomb. Done.
The safety net viewers had in mind, "this dad will get us through," blew up along with the insurance card.
Next is Nanami Miura. Officially, she's 26 and a personal trainer who does martial arts as a hobby. When people attack, she clearly pulls her weight in a fight.
Right after that, she breathes in toxic gas pooled in a low spot and dies.
Martial arts: great against people. Poison gas: ignores your defense stat.
This is where you start to see the show's rules. Having high stats doesn't mean you'll last longer in the story. Disasters don't read your character sheet.
3. Every new arrival starts to look like a replacement for the dead
Right after Nanami exits, KITE shows up from the sky. Officially, KITE is 18, a YouTuber with over 7 million subscribers who explores remote and dangerous places around the world and even films from the air with a powered paraglider.
In any other show, that would be a reliable new ally joining the team.
But after what we've seen, that's not how a viewer's brain reads it anymore.
- Dad: can survive in the wild → unexploded bomb
- Nanami: can fight → poison gas
- KITE: can fly → "So he's going to get swallowed by a crack in the ground, right?"
- Haruo, the former star track athlete → "They're going to crush his legs, aren't they?"
Of course, the last two are just death-prediction jokes I made while watching, not facts. But the fact that these guesses come so naturally shows how the early episodes keep repeating the same pattern: introduce a skill, then kill the character with something that skill can't handle.
Every time a new member arrives, it doesn't feel like "the group is growing." It feels like "a replacement for the empty slot just checked in." It's awful.
4. "I didn't mean to kill him": and yet the master archer hits him right in the chest
Near the end of episode 3, an arrow flies toward Go's chest. Episode 4 explains that a handheld game console in his waist bag stopped the arrow, so he wasn't hurt.
And the official profile of Kunio Hikita, the one who shot it, is pretty wild. He's a 78-year-old supermarket owner who won a national kyudo (Japanese archery) tournament as a student, so he's a master archer.
From here, the live commentary in my head turns into a crime news report.
"He reportedly told police he never meant to hit anyone..."
Uh, it hit him in the chest.
And it was an arrow with enough force to go through a game console. As a viewer, I care less about whether he meant to kill and more about why a national-level archer chose that line of fire.
Go survives, so the handheld console has suddenly been assigned a new role: Armor: chest plate / Rarity: SSR.
5. Japan tilts 7 degrees toward the Pacific: the giant Othello theory
In episode 4, we're told the Japanese archipelago is tilting about 7 degrees toward the Pacific side. With the visuals, it looks like the whole archipelago is one big board tipping into the sea.
The Pacific: "We'll take everything on this side."
The Sea of Japan side: "We haven't been flipped yet."
It's less crustal movement than a giant game of Othello.
That said, the idea of land tilting isn't pure fiction. In a USGS study, a nearly uniform tilt was surveyed on Middleton Island in Alaska. And after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, Japan's Geospatial Information Authority observed more than 1 m of subsidence around the Oshika Peninsula.
So an island or a region rising or sinking and ending up tilted really does happen.
But the entire Japanese archipelago tilting 7 degrees like a single slab is another level. The real Japan is made up of several plate boundaries, faults, and crustal blocks. It's best to think of the show as sci-fi that blows up real crustal movement to the scale of the whole archipelago.
6. Even landslides fade into the background: disaster inflation turns mountains into extras
In the early episodes, one giant earthquake gave off a "the world is over" feeling. But by episode 4, even when a huge landslide hits, my reaction is just "yeah yeah, mountains collapse too."
That's disaster inflation.
After earthquakes, flooding, cracks in the ground, explosions, and poison gas in a row, a landslide big enough to carry its own movie gets demoted to a background event.
On top of that, the official description says "how will the world watch this unfold?", so the basic setup isn't the whole world sinking at once. It's Japan sinking while the world watches.
So it feels like this:
The world: "Earth is open for business."
Japan: "Earthquake! Tsunami! Subsidence! Poison gas! Landslide!"
The gods: "The Japan area has a 5x event rate."
If you're thinking of world-ending disaster movies like 2012, it only makes "why is Japan taking all the fire?" stand out more.
7. The more Japan sinks, the more global the party gets
The cast is interesting too. Mother Mari is from the Philippines and still holds Philippine citizenship. Go is a second grader who dreams of moving to Estonia someday. Then KITE joins, who travels the world, and in episode 4 even a British hitchhiker named Daniel comes along.
It started as a local evacuation party of neighborhood family and acquaintances, but the more Japan sinks, the more international it gets.
This isn't just adding characters. It also connects to the official themes: "the identity of people whose country is disappearing" and "how will the world watch this unfold?"
From a live-commentary angle, though:
The Philippines, Estonia, a world-traveling YouTuber, a Brit, and a 78-year-old national-level kyudo archer.
Only that last one isn't globalization; he came from the Warring States period.
8. And then in episode 4, Japan Sinks suddenly starts doing yoga
Here's the problem.
Episodes 1–3 hit you with disasters and deaths at high speed. Then episode 4 rests at a supermarket, moves on, picks up a hitchhiker, and arrives at a community called Shan City.
According to the official profile, Shan City is a spiritual community founded by Kanae Murota.
And on screen: yoga.
Viewer: "What about Mount Fuji?"
The show: "Yoga."
Viewer: "What about Japan sinking?"
The show: "A spiritual commune."
This sudden hard brake is probably one of the biggest reasons people feel "this is getting weird" in episode 4. You thought you were watching a disaster-survival show, and it feels like you've been logged into a village from a totally different genre.
The short run matters too. The official count for the streaming version is 10 episodes, so the detour starts with only 6 left. The issue isn't "they stretched it to 10 episodes." It's that they packed disaster, family, multiculturalism, identity, community, and views on life and death all into a 10-episode run, so the balance has gone to extremes.
9. The "it gets weird from episode 4" feeling shows up a bit in the numbers, but it recovers at episode 8
I checked the per-episode IMDb ratings on August 26, 2026, and here is how they looked. Ratings may change in the future.
| Episode | IMDb rating |
|---|---|
| 1 | 7.4 |
| 2 | 7.3 |
| 3 | 7.0 |
| 4 | 6.7 |
| 5 | 6.3 |
| 6 | 6.7 |
| 7 | 6.7 |
| 8 | 7.2 |
| 9 | 6.9 |
| 10 | 6.7 |
So going by the numbers alone: relatively high through episode 3 → a drop at episode 4 → episode 5 is the low point → recovery at episode 8.
That "episode 4 is dragging with no disaster, isn't it?" feeling overlaps, at least somewhat, with how IMDb users rated it.
So you want to speed through it, but there's a trap in Netflix's TV apps. According to Netflix's official help page, playback speed can be changed in a web browser, on Android phones and tablets, on iPhone, and on iPad. TV apps aren't included. And you can't change the speed while casting or mirroring from a mobile device either.
The show: "Please watch the yoga slowly."
The TV: "No fast-forward speed either."
Even the escape route has sunk.
10. Mount Fuji seems to be waiting for the camera the whole time
The landmarks of Tokyo, bridges, Okinawa, cracks in the ground, mountains, poison gas: everything joins the disaster in turn.
Meanwhile, Mount Fuji keeps making its presence felt on screen while being held in reserve.
🌋 "......"
Viewer: "You definitely still have work to do."
You might want to predict that "if only episode 8 goes up in rating, Fuji must finally go all out there." But that's just meta-guessing while watching. It's more fun not to look at what comes next.
Up to episode 4, Japan Sinks: 2020 isn't a show you enjoy just for realistic disasters. Rather, it's a show that throws in crustal movement and evacuation terror that could really happen, plus extreme sci-fi, sudden deaths, an increasingly international cast, and a sudden spiritual detour, until even the viewer's urge to snark has to fight to survive.
Dad blows up, the fighter loses to gas, the master archer shoots a chest and says "I didn't mean to kill," Japan tilts like an Othello board, and at the end: yoga.
And it's only episode 4.
Mount Fuji is probably warming up backstage.
