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Japan’s prime minister took the highly unusual step of cancelling plans for a visit to central Asia on Friday, after the Japan Meteorological Agency issued its first-ever warning of a potentially major earthquake on the country’s Pacific coast.
The unprecedented alert on Thursday, which did not come with a specific timeframe or evacuation orders, emerged from a new warning system and relates to what seismologists in Japan said was now a raised probability of a massive quake in the ocean-floor trench known as the Nankai Trough.
The alert, issued on Thursday evening, came about an hour after a magnitude 7.1 quake struck near the coast of Kyushu — the southernmost of the four largest islands that make up the Japanese archipelago.
That quake, though very large, caused limited damage: only a small number of injuries were reported and, despite initial warnings, the coast was not hit by a tsunami.
But since 2017, Japan has had a system in place that analyses quakes larger than 6.8 magnitude around Nankai, where tectonic plates intersect, and can issue alerts if an event is judged to increase the probability of a large earthquake.
That system triggered an alert for the first time on Thursday, prompting an investigation within the first 30 minutes and an emergency meeting of the body of experts that advises the government on issuing an alert. The head of that body, Naoshi Hirata, said that following Thursday’s quake, the probability of a major Nankai quake had increased “several times”.
The agency emphasised, though, that while the probability was higher, the warning did not mean a huge quake was imminent.
The JMA and seismology experts place the chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 quake occurring at some point over the next 30 years at between 70 and 80 per cent. The quake that left large parts of the Tohoku region in ruins in 2011 measured 9 in magnitude, and was the largest-ever recorded in Japan.
Thursday’s warning was not only the first of its kind, but appears to have forced a decision by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to avoid leaving Japan in the short term.
Nankai is an area that has long been the focus of fears of massive, devastating seismic activity. Various scenarios have been mapped out by the Japanese authorities, including ones where a Nankai quake rips through an area stretching from Tokyo to Okinawa, threatening many coastal cities with huge tsunamis. Some estimates have put the potential death toll of such an event at more than 320,000.
Kishida’s decision to cancel his three-country visit to Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan came as retailers in Japan reported a sharp rise over the past 24 hours in sales of emergency goods, bottled water and other quake-related supplies. Investors have also focused on the threat to industry in the Kyushu region, noting that it has recently become a target of heavy investment by the semiconductor industry.
The prime minister told a press conference on Friday that rather than travelling abroad, he had decided to stay in Japan for the following week — a traditional holiday season — to ensure that the country’s quake preparations and communications were ready.
Although no specific evacuations have been ordered, Kishida said: “It is the first time [the alert] has been issued and I believe people would be feeling anxious about it.”
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