Not really sure what's the criteria to close this question when there are similar others like: history.stackexchange.com/questions/8955/… movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2876/…. Don't mean to do any bashing, just that I quite don't see why this one should be closed when the others are quite as broad and could be answered as well with a "It's a novel!", "It;s a TV series!"

Apart from the comments above, the question itself could be answered as "there's no real answer": Venice continues to sink every year, NY is one of America's dirtiest and polluted cities: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_New_York_City and Budapest has not changed locations since 1 AD (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest#History) - yet people still live on these cities. It's like asking why Japan continues to build buildings in such a seismic area: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismicity_in_Japan. I don't believe there's an actual answer for this question, it just is.

Interesting, I was not aware of that. The Aztecs had the same belief with Hernan Cortes and their god Quetzalcoatl: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…. And according to this book, the Incas, Mexica and Aztecs had the same belief: books.google.com/…

I would think that the Japanese stopped buying candy, would follow closely the news as per any new incidents and overall started to be highly suspicious of produced foods. The thing is that I am not sure if the wikipedia article is making the issue a lot bigger than it really was or if it's true that it changed Japanese society.