Powerful quake strikes off Japan; no tsunami warning

A Japanese kendo player looks up the ceiling as a strong earthquake jolts Nippon Budokan martial arts hall during an awarding ceremony for the World Kendo Championships in Tokyo Saturday, May 30. AP

TOKYO, Japan—A powerful and extremely deep earthquake struck near remote Japanese islands and shook Tokyo on Saturday, but officials said there was no danger of a tsunami, and no injuries or damage were immediately reported.

The magnitude-8.5 offshore earthquake struck off the Ogasawara islands at 8:24 p.m. at a depth of 590 kilometers, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said. The US Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 7.8 and a depth of 678 kilometers.

Public broadcaster NHK said there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

But the temblor was powerful enough to rattle large parts of Japan’s main island of Honshu. Buildings swayed in Tokyo—about 1,000 kilometers north of the Ogasawara islands—and stopped some train services in the city. There were reports that parts of the capital were without power.

The meteorological agency did not issue a tsunami warning because the quake struck so far beneath the earth’s surface. Deep offshore earthquakes usually do not cause tsunamis, and generally cause less damage than shallow ones.

Yoshiyuki Sasamoto, who runs a traditional guest house on Chichijima, one of the closest inhabited places to the epicenter, told NHK the shaking had been violent.

“Initially a weaker quake hit and it stopped. Then the big one came. It was so strong that I couldn’t stand still and couldn’t walk,” he said.

Both runways at Narita Airport, the main international gateway to Tokyo, were temporarily closed while inspections were carried out. Trains in Tokyo were also temporarily halted and a football match in the city was briefly suspended.

There were no reported abnormalities at any of the region’s mothballed nuclear power plants.

A massive undersea quake that hit in March 2011 sent a tsunami barreling into Japan’s northeast coast.

As well as killing thousands of people and destroying communities, the waves also swamped the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear plant, sending three reactors into meltdown.

The nuclear disaster, the world’s worst since Chernobyl, displaced tens of thousands of people and rendered tracts of land uninhabitable, possibly for decades.

Saturday’s rattle was the second sizable shake Tokyo has had this week, after a much less powerful—but far shallower—quake hit close to the capital on Monday.

Japan sits at the meeting place of four tectonic plates and experiences around 20 percent of the world’s most powerful earthquakes every year.

On Friday a volcano in the far south of Japan erupted, spewing a huge column of ash high into the sky and forcing authorities to evacuate the island on which it sits.

The eruption caused no injuries and no damage was reported, but it served as yet another reminder of the volatile geology of the country.