In parts of Kumamoto Prefecture, it registered 7 on the Japanese shindo (seismic intensity) scale, which reflects the amount of ground shaking at a particular location. The shindo is a better indicator of the likely amount of damage than the magnitude is. A shindo of 7 is extremely strong [1].
Ten minutes ago (at around 17:15 p.m. Japan time), NHK was reporting that there were many emergency calls coming in from Uki City, where shindo 7 was recorded, but that the extent of the damage or injuries was not yet known.
There have also been many aftershocks, including some strong ones, and tsunami warnings.
NHK TV is showing extensive damage including fallen smokestacks at Nippon Paper Factory facility, bridge road separation, fallen bridge lane, road cracks, fire, water coming out of drainage etc. It was a huge earthquake and will take some time to assess the damage.
The second floor of the mall exploded for some reason, and the roof collapse is secondary to that. It seems to have happened after the earthquake and subsequent evacuation. There are videos of people leaving the mall:
> Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
Since the mid-2000s there has actually been a push by Japanese utility companies for adoption of what they call "all-electric" オール電化.
Adoption has been reasonably good with new-builds because they can also have solar panels. But adoption in older properties has been slower.
First in general, electricity in Japan has tended to be more expensive than gas.
Second, a large Part of the slow adoption comes from cooking related inertia.
A lot of traditional (and therefore very common) Japanese cookware just will not work on electric, full stop. For example, traditional donabe (clay pots).
Beyond that, for example, aluminium pans being non-ferromagnetic will not work on induction. Yes you find aluminium pans in the West with extra ferromagnetic bases attached, but that is not common in Japan.
Finally, the Japan Society of Cookery Science did commission a study[1] where they had two groups of people cook four dishes on both gas and induction. The conclusion was gas was preferred across all four.
The study doesn't appear to be blind (not sure how you can do a blind cooking test). Also, The panellists were satisfied with cooking when they could control the heat as desired suggests inexperience with electric is a part of preference (as a personal anecdote, it took me a few months to get used to an electric stove in a new house after a lifetime of cooking on gas). This is also over a decade old. There have been some advancements in electric cookery since.
Yeah it's crazy to me, especially in earthquake-prone places like Japan or California.
I bought a house here in Japan last year and replaced the gas with all-electric due to concerns of not only leaks and disasters but also just in day-to-day use gas isn't good for indoor air quality.
Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
For example to replicate a gas burner you have to have above 15KW continious power. Good luck wiring that into your apartment, or feeding this with local solar. Or even finding an induction stovetop that won't melt its insides in a year or two at a measly 5KW.
- at least 50 hospitalized due to various injuries[1]
- 9 missing, 12 house collapses, 4 trappings, 7 fires so far[1]
- multiple highway road bridges snapped, roads damaged[2]
- AEON brand shopping mall exploded following evacuation, cause unknown[3]
- chimney collapsed at Nippon Seishi paper factory[4]
- TSMC, Sony, Fujifilm chips, imagers, materials plants evacuated[4]
- epicenter reported as 32.6N 130.7E[5], roughly 20km/12mi south of previous major earthquake[7],
320km/200mi SE from Busan, 650km/400mi from Seoul, 900km/550mi WSW from Tokyo, likewise 900km/550mi
due east from Shanghai, 1200km/730mi due south to Vladivostok, etc
- stone wall behind a moat damaged again at Kumamoto castle[8]
On top of that, one of the toughest part could be the extent of the power outage.
It's reported at around 46000 homes, the region has many elders and the outage will impact air conditionners, but also medical equipment they keep at home and supporting appliances.
This was my first real earthquake since moving to Kyushu. After it stopped I looked it up, and the first place to post the epicenter and shindo was NERV's twitter...which is named after the org from the anime and has an anime screenshot as its banner (https://x.com/EN_NERV). Apparently it's a real disaster information service, though.
It started as a Twitter account during the Tohoku 2011 earthquake, and then subsequently became a “real” service; the IP owners for the Eva agreed to let them use it going forward.
The Nerv app is quite good. It usually gives real-time alerts faster than the official sources.
You can even have the weird experience of being notified of an earthquake, watching the shockwave move outward from the epicenter, and feeling it as it passes.
I'm living in the South of Japan, it was a 4 intensity where I am (about 90km) from the epicenter. Luckily there was only some light shaking and nothing fell over here.
Kumamoto is barely finished rebuilding from the last quake, you can still see cracks in structures as you drive down the road. This is really horrible; not to mention the city is already beginning to depopulate as the youth move north to Fukuoka.
I wouldn't let this get in the way of going there though. Kumamoto is a very nice prefecture to see. They will rebuild (again) and it'll continue to be a great place.
I hope everyone is safe in Kumamoto.
In my area, we have been repeatedly warned that a major earthquake called the Nankai Trough is likely to occur in the last few years or decades, so I am very scared of big earthquakes happening in other areas as well.
To be a bit more precise, the Nankai ("South Sea") Trough is a tectonic subduction zone to the south of Japan, roughly the entire length from Izu to Kyushu:
I was camping/bike packing in Kyushu when this happened! I think I was in Miyazaki on the 14th when we felt the first shock. It was the first earthquake I’d experienced. The multi-story hotel we stayed at felt like it was gyrating in a circular fashion.
Then my pal and I were camping by the Utagenka Bridge, east of Kumamoto for the main shock!
Fukuoka here (about 100km from Kumamoto) and definitely felt it, so it must have been a real big one in Kumamoto itself.
My friend was driving home from work closer to Miyazaki and didn't feel the quake, but had huge hailstones hitting his car. There's a rapture going on or something
Yeah, clearly some religious event or what not, nothing scientists could have pointed out that might lead to more extreme weather events and natural disasters. It's truly a mystery what could be going on.
I’m genuinely asking here - is climate change thought to have influence on earthquakes? I wouldn’t have expected so, but maybe there are some non-obvious pathways for it to be the case?
(Thinking that perhaps the hailstones were what the original commenter was referring too - although, perhaps the gods are just unhappy with the state of the world overall - this isn't the first big earthquake this year, huge numbers of forest fires, record heat levels...)
I have a vivid recollection of a crotchety old man in Southern California telling me “yup, this is earthquake weather” on a hot, clear day. (There wasn’t an earthquake that day.) It was so bizarre and disconnected from science that it was burned into my mind. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
That being said, there is some redistribution of tectonic weight that may happen due to entire ice caps melting… that has the potential to trigger movement.
Given it’s barely even felt outside of Kyushu (JMA 3, the dark blue dots, is "dishes may rattle, some people walking outside notice") that seems unlikely.
Every once in a while (not every year) there are minor earthquakes you can feel in some parts of SK, like Busan: the ground tremors a bit, some shelves wobble... that's the most I've ever noticed.
Found a few online webcams, but I'm not really sure I saw the earthquake. People didn't even seem to stop on the webcam I was watching. Lots of cars on the bridge afterwards though while before it there were much less, idk
One thing I've noticed is that people in Fukuoka have stayed calm. I haven't seen panic buying of food or emergency supplies despite being so close to the disaster area.
Not like earthquakes are unheard of in Taiwan or South Korea either.
Buildings are going to be more expensive (base isolation and an extra commie blocks worth of reinforced concrete), but given how expensive fab equipment is, that might not even matter all that much.
Earthquake isolation can be pretty amazing. Here’s a video of a data center during the big 2011 quake. The camera is attached to the outer wall so the point of reference makes the wrong side look like it’s shaking, but you can see the people walking without difficulty during some pretty heavy shaking. A fab will have even better stuff.
Wow, it's incredible how far civil engineering has come in the past 600 years. To think that we used to have bridges collapse all the time, and buildings crack and collapse, and now we have buildings that can withstand a whole earthquake.
There's plenty of old buildings here that are not built up to the latest standards; increasing exponentially the further you get from the core of a big city.
Japan is _very good_ at tearing down old buildings and building better in their place; but it doesn't mean that there are zero old buildings around.
They could have been further away from the epicenter of the previous ones, or the previous ones weren't strong enough to cause that specific structure to collapse, the previous ones might have weakened the structure and this one brought it down, a million different things factor into this.
Earthquakes aren't a perfectly repeatable occurrences you can run a regression test against.
Like half of the buildings are non-resistant since they are old and made of wood. IIRC only buildings built after 1991 are guaranteed to be earthquake resistant.
Yes, but the situation got a lot better and a lot worse...
Sadly there has been a bunch of pretty devastating earthquakes in recent years.
In particular in Kumamoto the one in 2016 (magnitude 6.5) was huge and many of the houses built at lower standard or not in great shape anymore got partially or totally wrecked. Right now the house that are left are relatively well built.
The bad news is, that still doesn't help as the cumulative damage can still bring them down, and they're still subject to landslides, water damage, and other second order disastrous events.
For a long time "live with earthquakes and build accordingly" meant "make it easy to rebuild", not "engineer the structures to withstand the earthquakes".
The regulations got hardened in 1991. Obviously there has been earthquakes forever, but the buildings were not built to withstand them. That's one of the reasons why Japanese do not buy old homes: they are not earthquake proof.
One of the reasons Japan uses wood for construction is that combined with their traditional building techniques it results in earthquake resistant buildings.
Haven't seen anything on the Tsunami global warning list so hopefully it's okay. Earthquake looks centered on land which (to my unofficial understanding) means low risk of Tsunami but of course higher chance of direct damage
In parts of Kumamoto Prefecture, it registered 7 on the Japanese shindo (seismic intensity) scale, which reflects the amount of ground shaking at a particular location. The shindo is a better indicator of the likely amount of damage than the magnitude is. A shindo of 7 is extremely strong [1].
Ten minutes ago (at around 17:15 p.m. Japan time), NHK was reporting that there were many emergency calls coming in from Uki City, where shindo 7 was recorded, but that the extent of the damage or injuries was not yet known.
There have also been many aftershocks, including some strong ones, and tsunami warnings.
[1] https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/jishintsunami/jishin...
English link on the shindo scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...
NHK TV is showing extensive damage including fallen smokestacks at Nippon Paper Factory facility, bridge road separation, fallen bridge lane, road cracks, fire, water coming out of drainage etc. It was a huge earthquake and will take some time to assess the damage.
I at least can see English translated version of NHK here https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live_tv/
There is a collapsed roof of a shopping centre as well in Kumamoto. The Aeon Mall.
The second floor of the mall exploded for some reason, and the roof collapse is secondary to that. It seems to have happened after the earthquake and subsequent evacuation. There are videos of people leaving the mall:
https://x.com/yuto4388/status/2082060992377475247/video/1?s=...
For the record, Aeon Mall is basically a brand - there are many Aeon malls in Japan in various cities.
The mall had a (most likely gas) explosion, and there are many dead being found inside https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/-/2833412?display=1
> The mall had a (most likely gas) explosion
If the internet searches are to be believed, that is indeed sadly likely to be the cause.
The internet suggests the explosion happened on the second floor of the mall where a large food court is located.
A hundred years from now people are going to be absolutely flabbergasted how we just piped gas everywhere all the time.
Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
> Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
Since the mid-2000s there has actually been a push by Japanese utility companies for adoption of what they call "all-electric" オール電化.
Adoption has been reasonably good with new-builds because they can also have solar panels. But adoption in older properties has been slower.
First in general, electricity in Japan has tended to be more expensive than gas.
Second, a large Part of the slow adoption comes from cooking related inertia.
A lot of traditional (and therefore very common) Japanese cookware just will not work on electric, full stop. For example, traditional donabe (clay pots).
Beyond that, for example, aluminium pans being non-ferromagnetic will not work on induction. Yes you find aluminium pans in the West with extra ferromagnetic bases attached, but that is not common in Japan.
Finally, the Japan Society of Cookery Science did commission a study[1] where they had two groups of people cook four dishes on both gas and induction. The conclusion was gas was preferred across all four.
[1]https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/cookeryscience/47/6/47_...
The study doesn't appear to be blind (not sure how you can do a blind cooking test). Also, The panellists were satisfied with cooking when they could control the heat as desired suggests inexperience with electric is a part of preference (as a personal anecdote, it took me a few months to get used to an electric stove in a new house after a lifetime of cooking on gas). This is also over a decade old. There have been some advancements in electric cookery since.
Yeah it's crazy to me, especially in earthquake-prone places like Japan or California.
I bought a house here in Japan last year and replaced the gas with all-electric due to concerns of not only leaks and disasters but also just in day-to-day use gas isn't good for indoor air quality.
Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
For example to replicate a gas burner you have to have above 15KW continious power. Good luck wiring that into your apartment, or feeding this with local solar. Or even finding an induction stovetop that won't melt its insides in a year or two at a measly 5KW.
On top of that, one of the toughest part could be the extent of the power outage.
It's reported at around 46000 homes, the region has many elders and the outage will impact air conditionners, but also medical equipment they keep at home and supporting appliances.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/55a0a3ebb9d0087ae8492ce85c...
This was my first real earthquake since moving to Kyushu. After it stopped I looked it up, and the first place to post the epicenter and shindo was NERV's twitter...which is named after the org from the anime and has an anime screenshot as its banner (https://x.com/EN_NERV). Apparently it's a real disaster information service, though.
It's been mentioned before but maybe interesting to some (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38835419).
You can keep an eye on this english tracker in the browser too https://earthquakesjapan.com
It started as a Twitter account during the Tohoku 2011 earthquake, and then subsequently became a “real” service; the IP owners for the Eva agreed to let them use it going forward.
The Nerv app is quite good. It usually gives real-time alerts faster than the official sources.
You can even have the weird experience of being notified of an earthquake, watching the shockwave move outward from the epicenter, and feeling it as it passes.
Somewhat unrelated but how did you find the process of moving to Japan (assuming you emigrated there)
I'm living in the South of Japan, it was a 4 intensity where I am (about 90km) from the epicenter. Luckily there was only some light shaking and nothing fell over here.
Hope the areas around you were just as lucky, thanks for the update!
Kumamoto is barely finished rebuilding from the last quake, you can still see cracks in structures as you drive down the road. This is really horrible; not to mention the city is already beginning to depopulate as the youth move north to Fukuoka.
I wouldn't let this get in the way of going there though. Kumamoto is a very nice prefecture to see. They will rebuild (again) and it'll continue to be a great place.
I hope everyone is safe in Kumamoto. In my area, we have been repeatedly warned that a major earthquake called the Nankai Trough is likely to occur in the last few years or decades, so I am very scared of big earthquakes happening in other areas as well.
To be a bit more precise, the Nankai ("South Sea") Trough is a tectonic subduction zone to the south of Japan, roughly the entire length from Izu to Kyushu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nankai_Trough
And Nankai megathrust earthquakes are those caused by plate movement there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nankai_megathrust_earthquakes
Statistically major earthquakes occur here every 90-200 years, and the last was in 1946.
Similar strength and location as the 2016 one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kumamoto_earthquakes
I was camping/bike packing in Kyushu when this happened! I think I was in Miyazaki on the 14th when we felt the first shock. It was the first earthquake I’d experienced. The multi-story hotel we stayed at felt like it was gyrating in a circular fashion.
Then my pal and I were camping by the Utagenka Bridge, east of Kumamoto for the main shock!
Fukuoka here (about 100km from Kumamoto) and definitely felt it, so it must have been a real big one in Kumamoto itself.
My friend was driving home from work closer to Miyazaki and didn't feel the quake, but had huge hailstones hitting his car. There's a rapture going on or something
> There's a rapture going on or something
Yeah, clearly some religious event or what not, nothing scientists could have pointed out that might lead to more extreme weather events and natural disasters. It's truly a mystery what could be going on.
oh my science!!
I’m genuinely asking here - is climate change thought to have influence on earthquakes? I wouldn’t have expected so, but maybe there are some non-obvious pathways for it to be the case?
In theory - maybe - melting of glaciers and polar icecaps could be a factor - but not everywhere:
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-climate-chang... - https://www.weforum.org/stories/climate-action/climate-chang...
(Thinking that perhaps the hailstones were what the original commenter was referring too - although, perhaps the gods are just unhappy with the state of the world overall - this isn't the first big earthquake this year, huge numbers of forest fires, record heat levels...)
I have a vivid recollection of a crotchety old man in Southern California telling me “yup, this is earthquake weather” on a hot, clear day. (There wasn’t an earthquake that day.) It was so bizarre and disconnected from science that it was burned into my mind. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
That being said, there is some redistribution of tectonic weight that may happen due to entire ice caps melting… that has the potential to trigger movement.
Does anyone know if this also affects South Korea?
Given it’s barely even felt outside of Kyushu (JMA 3, the dark blue dots, is "dishes may rattle, some people walking outside notice") that seems unlikely.
Dishes may rattle feels like such a japanese way to describe it
Indeed! I've never experienced an earthquake strong enough to rattle anything
Every once in a while (not every year) there are minor earthquakes you can feel in some parts of SK, like Busan: the ground tremors a bit, some shelves wobble... that's the most I've ever noticed.
Never felt anything in SK
Thank you for this update.
I was told that some people in Busan, the Korean city nearest to Japan, felt the earthquake and even felt dizzy.
I'm in Busan, though I didn't feel anything. (I was on the beach at the time though.)
Was looking at webcams here (https://tokyo.fyi) but realized this is further south.
Found a few online webcams, but I'm not really sure I saw the earthquake. People didn't even seem to stop on the webcam I was watching. Lots of cars on the bridge afterwards though while before it there were much less, idk
Some of the webcams are fake fwiw, I noticed a while ago when there were ads emblassened with old dates on them.
Edit: to be clear, this was random ones on YouTube, not sure about that site.
Woah yes I found those on YouTube, didn’t expect them to be fake. This kind of makes sense but also makes me very disappointed of humanity
This was felt in Shanghai, like a truck passing by. The second one in two months?
It is very sad
It is currently summer vacation season in Japan, so we expect there to be many tourists. We hope everyone stays safe.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/28/asia/japan-earthquake-int... for some Reuters reporting.
I'm in Fukuoka. We had shindo 3 here.
My phone alarm went off just before the shaking, but the thing that really surprised me was how strong it felt. I instinctively ran outside.
I hope everyone closer to the epicenter is safe.
One thing I've noticed is that people in Fukuoka have stayed calm. I haven't seen panic buying of food or emergency supplies despite being so close to the disaster area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEhLWGJE4M
arent they trying to make silicon fabs there?
Not like earthquakes are unheard of in Taiwan or South Korea either.
Buildings are going to be more expensive (base isolation and an extra commie blocks worth of reinforced concrete), but given how expensive fab equipment is, that might not even matter all that much.
Earthquake isolation can be pretty amazing. Here’s a video of a data center during the big 2011 quake. The camera is attached to the outer wall so the point of reference makes the wrong side look like it’s shaking, but you can see the people walking without difficulty during some pretty heavy shaking. A fab will have even better stuff.
https://youtu.be/GXwQSCStRaw
Wow, it's incredible how far civil engineering has come in the past 600 years. To think that we used to have bridges collapse all the time, and buildings crack and collapse, and now we have buildings that can withstand a whole earthquake.
It’s been officially revised down to 6.8, but that’s still a lot.
Hope the residents of Kumamoto Prefecture stay safe and are able to evacuate.
also earth quake in china.
7.1 seems to mean non resistant buildings may collapse.
Yea seems pretty bad given its on the higher end of the scale... I might be naive but I hope nobody died
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kumamoto_earthquakes
The main shock of this one at 7.0 killed 277 people so sadly I think it’s pretty likely there will be some deaths.
It's Japan though. They don't have non-resistant buildings.
There's plenty of old buildings here that are not built up to the latest standards; increasing exponentially the further you get from the core of a big city.
Japan is _very good_ at tearing down old buildings and building better in their place; but it doesn't mean that there are zero old buildings around.
Wouldn't the not so strong old buildings have collapsed during previous quakes?
They could have been further away from the epicenter of the previous ones, or the previous ones weren't strong enough to cause that specific structure to collapse, the previous ones might have weakened the structure and this one brought it down, a million different things factor into this.
Earthquakes aren't a perfectly repeatable occurrences you can run a regression test against.
Possibly, and then rebuilt. They rebuild houses every 20, 30 odd years anyway (according to https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...), and temples too https://longnow.org/ideas/long-term-building-in-japan/.
Like half of the buildings are non-resistant since they are old and made of wood. IIRC only buildings built after 1991 are guaranteed to be earthquake resistant.
Yes, but the situation got a lot better and a lot worse...
Sadly there has been a bunch of pretty devastating earthquakes in recent years. In particular in Kumamoto the one in 2016 (magnitude 6.5) was huge and many of the houses built at lower standard or not in great shape anymore got partially or totally wrecked. Right now the house that are left are relatively well built.
The bad news is, that still doesn't help as the cumulative damage can still bring them down, and they're still subject to landslides, water damage, and other second order disastrous events.
Earthquakes didn't start in 1991. The Japanese have always had to live with earthquakes and build accordingly.
For a long time "live with earthquakes and build accordingly" meant "make it easy to rebuild", not "engineer the structures to withstand the earthquakes".
In Gölcük/İzmit, there was a huge 7.4 earthquake in 99.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake
It took around 10 years until the city felt "normal" again (source: a close friend lives there).
My point is, it's never easy to rebuild.
The regulations got hardened in 1991. Obviously there has been earthquakes forever, but the buildings were not built to withstand them. That's one of the reasons why Japanese do not buy old homes: they are not earthquake proof.
One of the reasons Japan uses wood for construction is that combined with their traditional building techniques it results in earthquake resistant buildings.
For anyone that had their heart skip a beat like me:
"The Japanese Nuclear Energy Agency says no damage has been detected at three nearby nuclear power plants."
Truly devastating, hope people are safe
ohh. what was the intensity?
United States Geological Survey https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=21.04224...
Live NHK-WORLD-NEWS feed (English-language commentator) https://www.youtube.com/live/f0lYkdA-Gtw?si=Sc8ZbldZUQESiJQZ
The HNK stream can also be viewed at https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live_tv/ with English dubs. The youtube feed looks to have stopped for now.
Shit hope everyone is ok.
Tldr; Seems like major cities didn't get hit by the earthquake at 7 scale.
Hoping for zero casualities.
Apparently there is a risk for tsunami so Japanese govt has issued a further alert. Hope it isn't anything too bad either
Haven't seen anything on the Tsunami global warning list so hopefully it's okay. Earthquake looks centered on land which (to my unofficial understanding) means low risk of Tsunami but of course higher chance of direct damage
Godzilla is waking up.
8 is serious. 9 is Pacific subduction rupture.
7 is not really top news of the day.
People with friends and family exposed don't really appreciate being false-alarmed with 7s and 6s.
I'm sure everyone in the hospital and with collapsed houses would agree with your assessment that it's not a big deal.
The HN audience decides what is too news of the day, that’s the whole principle this website is based upon
This is really interesting