A powerful magnitude 7.3 earthquake jolted Japan’s northeast coast off Fukushima late on Wednesday, leaving two dead and 94 injured and reviving memories of a quake and tsunami that crippled the same region just over a decade earlier.
There were some reports of fire, the government said. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said on Thursday morning that there had been two confirmed deaths and 94 injured, including four seriously.
The quake was felt in Tokyo, some 275 kilometres (170 miles) away, where the shaking of buildings was long and pronounced. Hundreds of thousands of homes in the capital were plunged into darkness for an hour or more, although power was fully restored by the early hours of Thursday morning.
Authorities cancelled an earlier tsunami warning.
Just before midnight, the quake hit off the coast of Fukushima prefecture at a depth of 60 kilometres, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. It sparked memories of a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, a week after that disaster’s 11th anniversary.
There were no abnormalities at nuclear power plants, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters. The 2011 disaster triggered a meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Fukushima, an incident Japan is still coming to grips with.
