Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida canceled this weekend’s visit to Central Asia after experts warned of an increased risk of a “megaquake” along the country’s Pacific coast after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the southwest on Thursday.
Kishida, who is battling low approval ratings and facing a leadership challenge in next month’s ruling party presidential election, announced the decision at a news conference on Friday.
He was scheduled to hold a summit with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on Friday night in the Kazakh capital Astana, and meet with the Mongolian president in Ulaanbaatar on Monday, Kyodo news agency reported.
The Japan Meteorological Agency on Thursday issued its first warning of the risk of a major earthquake along the Pacific coast after an earthquake off the southernmost island of Kyushu triggered a tsunami warning. There have been no reports of casualties or major damage.
The agency warned of a higher-than-usual risk of a major earthquake along the Nankai Trough, but that doesn’t mean an earthquake is certain to occur in the coming days. Public broadcaster NHK said Kishida’s overseas trip had been canceled so that he could prepare for possible scenarios.
The Meteorological Agency’s major earthquake warning warns that “if a major earthquake occurs in the future, strong shaking and a large tsunami will occur.”
It added: “The likelihood of new major earthquakes is higher than normal, but this does not indicate that a major earthquake will definitely occur within a specific time period.”
The report concerns the “subduction zone” of the Nankai Trough between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, an area that has experienced large earthquakes in the past.
The 800-kilometer (500-mile) submarine trough, which stretches from Shizuoka west of Tokyo to the southern tip of Kyushu, is responsible for devastating earthquakes of magnitude 8 or 9 every 100 to 200 years.
These so-called “megaquakes” often occur in pairs, triggering dangerous tsunamis off the southern coast of Japan, one of the most seismically active countries in the world.
In 1707, all parts of the Nankai Trough ruptured simultaneously, triggering an earthquake that was the second largest on record in the country, after the March 2011 Tohoku Coast earthquake.
That earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people and caused three meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
While it’s impossible to predict the precise timing of an earthquake — aside from automated warnings that it could strike within seconds — government experts believe there’s a 70 to 80 percent chance of a magnitude 8 or higher quake occurring around the area’s trough. A magnitude 9 earthquake.
In the worst-case scenario, the disaster would kill 300,000 people, and some experts estimate the economic damage to be as high as $13 trillion.
“The history of the Nankai earthquake is truly frightening,” geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter. But he added there was no need for the public to panic.
Bradley and Hubbard wrote that there was a “low chance” that Thursday’s quake was a foreshock, adding: “One of the challenges is that even though the risk of a second earthquake is high, it is still low .
