Earlier on Friday, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida decided to skip his tour of Central Asia to concentrate on security procedures. This decision was taken after a very first and very monitored warning about a probable big earthquake on the Pacific coast.
On Thursday, a Japanese weather agency put out its first alert urging of higher likelihood of a large quake along the Pacific coast. This came shortly after a 7. 1 Richter scale earthquake that occurred in Kyushu, a southwestern island in the same week.
Kishida announced that he would stay in the country for a week, to guarantee the arrangements and the communication on safety matters. Kishida also remarked that although the warning was general and did not indicate when an earthquake might happen or if people needed to evacuate, the message did leave a positive impact on the people feeling uneasy.
Thus, the scheduled trip to Kishida starting from Friday to Monday, which will encompass the visit to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia has been called off. However, instead of meetings with heads of regions, the government can establish the meeting through the Internet.
The warning said that there was a heightened danger of a large quake in an underwater region called the Nankai Trough along the Pacific coast of Japan, where big quakes have generated giant waves regarded as tsunamis. The agency used terms implying that they did not expect a quake to occur but indicated that the people could be prepared in case of an earthquake. The infrastructure ministry of Japan says that the probability of a major quake on the Nankai Trough within the next three decades is between 70-80 percent.