Japan Gets Off Lightly in 7.3 Quake

Japan escaped relatively lightly after the strongest earthquake in years rocked the southwestern region of the country Friday afternoon.

The quake, which had a magnitude of 7.3 and hit about 1:30 p.m., buckled some roads, destroyed or damaged more than 500 homes and a shrine, caused some landslides and temporarily shut down some bullet and local trains.

The temblor’s epicenter was about 315 miles southwest of Tokyo, 6 miles underground in the mostly rural Tottori prefecture on Japan’s main island of Honshu.

Two nuclear power plants nearby were not affected, having been shut down before the quake for repairs.

About 100 people were reported injured, including one who fell off his bike when the earthquake hit and two hurt when a Shinto shrine collapsed. But as of early today, there were no reported deaths.

“We believe that the quake has not caused any large number of casualties or any huge damage,” Tadao Ando, head of the government’s crisis management team, said at a news conference Friday afternoon.

Nevertheless, nearly 3,000 area residents whose homes were damaged or needed to be checked were dispatched to temporary shelters.

The temblor was more powerful than the Great Hanshin earthquake that struck Kobe in January 1995, killing 6,425 people, destroying 250,000 homes and causing billions of dollars in damage.

But the city nearest to the epicenter, Yonago, an old castle town, has a population of about 134,000, compared with Kobe’s 1.4 million inhabitants.

According to news reports, most major companies with factories in the area said they had suffered no major damage.

Japan’s archipelago is one of the world’s most vulnerable to earthquakes because of its location atop three tectonic plates. The shaking occurs so often that even video that national television station NHK took of its newsroom during the earthquake showed few employees even getting up from their desks as lights swung from the ceiling and notebooks fell to the floor.

The quake was followed by more than 260 aftershocks of varying intensities that continued early this morning, and experts warned of a 40% chance of another earthquake of at least a magnitude 6 hitting the area again by this afternoon.

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Associated Press contributed to this report.