TOKYO – A major earthquake shook a wide area across eastern Japan on Saturday night, with its epicenter off the coast of Fukushima, near where three nuclear reactors melted after an earthquake and tsunami nearly 10 years ago.
The Japanese meteorological service said the earthquake’s preliminary magnitude was 7.1, but said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Occurring just under a month before the 10th anniversary of what is known as the great earthquake in eastern Japan, the earthquake shook the Tokyo metropolitan area for about 30 seconds, starting at 11:08 pm and was felt strongly in Fukushima and Sendai.
No serious damage was reported immediately, but authorities warned residents to prepare for an earthquake in the coming days.
The earthquake occurred when Tokyo and nine other large city governments are in a state of emergency to contain the coronavirus. Residents are encouraged to work from home and avoid going out at night, while restaurants and bars close at 8 pm.
Japan is also preparing to host the summer Olympic Games, postponed for one year from 2020. The Games are scheduled to start on July 23.
The authorities mobilize in response.
The prime minister’s office immediately opened a crisis management office and Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, which operates the nuclear power plants, said it was checking its monitoring stations in Fukushima to make sure there were no radiation leaks.
In Minami Soma, one of the villages of Fukushima evacuated after the 2011 nuclear disaster, NHK, the public broadcaster, reported that a strong horizontal tremor lasted about 30 seconds.
Tepco was checking all nuclear power plants in the affected region. According to NHK, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant was not damaged.
According to Katsunobu Kato, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s chief cabinet secretary, some 860,000 families were left without power in the affected areas. Several bullet train lines have been suspended.
What the hours and days to come can bring.
Speaking at NHK, Takashi Furumura, a professor at the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, warned that an earthquake of this size could be followed in two or three days by another of a similar scale.
He said the epicenter of the Saturday night earthquake was on the coast of Fukushima, probably about 37 miles below the sea.
Makiko Inoue, Hisako Ueno and Hikari Hida contributed to the report.