Do disasters affect us if they take place on the other side of the world? In 2011 the Japanese artist Koki Tanaka was in Los Angeles when a nuclear disaster occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, following a tsunami. Because he was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, both Japan and the disaster seemed very far away to him. He later learned, however, that people in Tokyo also felt distanced from the disaster, even though it occurred only 150 miles away from them. What Tanaka realized is that physical distance has little to do with how people perceive tragedies. Unless the tragedies affect them directly and immediately, people tend to feel uninvolved and distanced from them. Tragedies become easy to ignore when we think they affect other people, but not ourselves. For that reason, in 2017 Tanaka filmed himself walking hundreds of miles to the nearest nuclear power plant, so that he could physically feel the proximity between his own self and the plant. By walking all the way to the nuclear power station, Tanaka no longer considered it to be something foreign and unknowable. He proved that distance does not isolate people from a foreign event; rather, it is a bridge that connects them to it.