Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida yesterday canceled plans to visit Central Asia and Mongolia this weekend, following an unprecedented advisory that the risk of a major Pacific coast earthquake was higher than usual.
The Japan Meteorological Agency on Thursday issued its first-ever advisory of the risk of a huge earthquake on the nation’s Pacific coast, following a magnitude 7.1 tremor that struck the southwestern island of Kyushu the same day.
“I have decided to stay in the country for the next week or so to ensure our preparations and communications are in order,” Kishida told a press conference, although the advisory did not give a timeframe for the potential event or call for evacuations.
Photo: AFP
“But it is the first time it is issued and I believe people would be feeling anxious about it,” he said.
“Consequently, I have decided to cancel my planned visit to Central Asia and Mongolia,” he said.
The government might hold the meetings with regional leaders online instead, public broadcaster NHK said.
The visit to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia was originally set to run from yesterday to Monday.
The meteorological agency warned of a higher probability of a huge earthquake in the Nankai trough, an ocean-floor trench running along Japan’s Pacific coast where previous quakes have triggered enormous tsunamis.
It did not indicate a quake would happen, but encouraged people to be ready to evacuate if necessary.
Normally, Japan estimates the probability of an earthquake of magnitude 8 or 9 happening around the trough in the next 30 years at 70 to 80 percent, which equates to a one-in-a-thousand chance of an earthquake there in any given week.
With the new advisory, that probability has risen to a one-in-several-hundred chance, the agency said.
Some supermarkets in Shizuoka are reporting supply shortages after customers snapped up bottled water and reheatable rice packs, NHK said.
The current alert system came into effect in 2019, as the government sought to establish a way to put the public on alert for potential earthquakes, despite the difficulty of predicting when one might strike.
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