The Japanese government has warned more powerful earthquakes in the waters in the southwest of its main islands on Saturday, but urged the public not to believe the unfounded predictions of a major disaster.
On Friday, the authorities evacuated some residents of the remote islands near the epicenter of a 5.5 gross earthquake from the tip of the main island southern Kyushu.
This earthquake Thursday, strong enough to make the position difficult, was one of the more than 1,000 tremors in the islands of the Kagoshima prefecture in the past two weeks which have fueled rumors resulting from a comic strip prediction that a major catastrophe was going to fall to the country this month.
“With our current scientific knowledge, it is difficult to predict the exact time, place or scale of an earthquake,” said Ebita Ayataka, director of the surveillance division of the earthquake and tsunami of the Japanese weather agency, after a gross earthquake of 5.4 grows the region.
“We ask people to base their understanding of scientific evidence,” said Ebita at a press conference.
The manga, which some interpreted as predicting a catastrophic event on Saturday, prompted some travelers to avoid Japan. The arrivals of Hong Kong, where rumors circulated, fell 11% in May compared to the same month of last year, according to the latest data.
Japan has recorded visitor numbers this year, April with a monthly record of 3.9 million travelers.
Ryo Tatsuki, the artist behind the manga “The Future I SAW”, published for the first time in 1999 and reissued in 2021, said that she was “not a prophet”, in a press release published by his publisher.
Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the most active areas seismically in the world. It represents about a fifth of the earthquakes in the world of magnitude 6 or more.
