A powerful earthquake struck central Japan on Monday, January 2nd, 2024, killing at least six people, destroying buildings, and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes.
It's been nearly 13 years since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that triggered an accident at a nuclear plant in Fukushima and the Japanese did not forget it.
Each time the country has been hit by a large quake, the damage has been studied and the regulations updated.
A measure of the success is that when the massive 9.0 quake hit in 2011, the shaking level in Tokyo hit 5. That is the same as the shaking that Japan's capital suffered in 1923.
Following are some major Japanese quakes in the last 30 years:
- In 1923 the city was flattened - 140,000 people died. In 2011 huge skyscrapers swayed, windows shattered, but no major buildings fell. It was the tsunami that killed so many thousands, not the tremors on the ground.
- The biggest leap took place in 1981 after which all new buildings required seismic isolation measures
- On Jan 16, 1995, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 hit central Japan, devastating the western port city of Kobe. The worst earthquake to hit the country in 50 years killed more than 6,400 and caused an estimated $100 billion in damage.
- On Oct. 23, 2004, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck the Niigata region, about 250 km north of Tokyo, killing 65 people and injuring 3,000.
- On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan, killing nearly 20,000 people and causing a meltdown in Fukushima, leading to the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
- On April 16, 2016, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck in Kumamoto on the southern island of Japan, killing more than 220 people.
- On June 18, 2018, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in Osaka, Japan's second-biggest metropolis, killed four people, injured hundreds more and halted factory lines in an industrial area.
- On Sept 6, 2018, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake paralyzed Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, killing at least seven people, triggering landslides and knocking out power to its 5.3 million residents.
- On Feb. 13, 2021, a 7.3magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Fukushima in eastern Japan, injuring dozens of people and triggering widespread power outages.
- On March 16, 2022, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake jolted the coast off Fukushima again, leaving two dead and 94 injured and reviving memories of the quake and tsunami that crippled the same region just over a decade earlier.
