Was that an earthquake?
If you just felt something and you have never been in one before: small earthquakes are ordinary in Japan and most people around you will not react to a shindo 1 to 3. Here is what the Japan Meteorological Agency has actually reported in the last few hours.
This is information, not an alert. JapanPass sends no
notifications, carries no early warning and gives no instructions. Do not rely on this page
in an emergency. In an emergency call
119 (fire and ambulance) or
110 (police)
— the same numbers everywhere in Japan — and follow
JMA.
Shindo (震度) is Japan's intensity scale, 1 to 7, and it
describes how strongly the ground actually shook in a given place — which is the number
that matters where you are standing. Magnitude describes the earthquake itself and says
little about what you felt.
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Who to check, right now
We do not write emergency instructions. These are the organisations that do,
linked so you reach them rather than us.
- Japan Meteorological Agency
— what has just happened, and any tsunami warning in force. The list above on this page
comes from their own data.
- Safety Tips
— the Japan Tourism Agency app that pushes earthquake early warnings, tsunami warnings
and weather warnings, in fifteen languages.
- Japan Meteorological Agency, in other languages.
JMA’s own page, “Multilingual Information on Disaster Risk Reduction”, links its
weather, earthquake, tsunami and volcano information in languages other than Japanese. Warnings
stay in JMA’s words: we do not translate a warning level, and we never issue one.
- Disaster Emergency
Message Dial 171 — NTT’s message board, activated during a disaster. Their page
carries the steps; we do not repeat them here, because a digit wrong in our copy is a message
that never arrives.
- Your embassy or consulate — 194 missions in Japan,
with addresses and out-of-hours numbers where they are published.
Tsunami advisories are not on this page. They are issued separately by JMA. If one
matters to you, go straight to
JMA's tsunami page.
This site does not restate, summarise or interpret a tsunami warning.
Source: Japan Meteorological Agency (気象庁).
See the official map.