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For Hiroko Ogata, 75, the instinct was immediate. The moment the ground lurched beneath her family diner in Yatsushiro, she dropped under a table. She has spent her entire life in Kumamoto prefecture, a region that sits atop one of Japan’s most restless fault systems, so the drill is second nature. But nothing in that experience had prepared her for what came next.
“The last quake 10 years ago was nothing like this one,” she told BBC News. “I thought I would die.” At least 13 people have now been confirmed dead after a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck Kumamoto in Japan’s south-western Kyushu island late on Tuesday. Three of those fatalities occurred inside the Aeon shopping mall in Kumamoto city, where a number of people remain unaccounted for. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has warned that emergency services are in a “race against time.”
A City in Shock, a Mall in Crisis
The scale of disruption across Kumamoto is significant. Tens of thousands of residents have lost power and water. At least 45 medical facilities have sustained damage. The exterior walls of the 17th-century Kumamoto Castle crumbled in a cloud of dust, and the worship hall of the 19th-century Yatsushiro Shrine collapsed entirely. Takaichi deployed 4,600 personnel within hours of the tremor, pledging that teams would work “tirelessly through the night.”
Just a few hundred metres from the stricken Aeon mall, a cake shop owner who asked to be identified only as Yui was sitting in her back office when the shaking began. “I couldn’t tell which was the sound of the earthquake and which was the sound of the explosion,” she told the BBC. “All I could do was hold the chair I was sitting in as big jolts came one after another.” She described a numbness that still had not lifted by the time she spoke to reporters. “I didn’t know what to feel; I couldn’t even feel scared in such a situation.”
Michal Posan, a 25-year-old who has lived in Kumamoto for two years, described a more immediate material crisis. “My TV fell on me, my mirror smashed and the roads around me were damaged,” she told the BBC, adding that she had begun packing evacuation bags because of the “constant aftershocks.” Another local resident noted that people were already anxious about a repeat of 2016, when a second, deadly earthquake followed the first by just a few days.
The Fault That Has Not Finished Moving
That anxiety is not unfounded, and the science behind it is sobering. Kyushu island is threaded with active fault zones, including the Hinagu fault, which runs approximately 81 kilometres through the island’s interior. The 2016 earthquake sequence partially activated that fault, but crucially, significant sections of it never ruptured. Seismologists have long flagged those unruptured segments as a source of serious future risk.
Shinji Kiyomoto of Japan’s Meteorological Agency addressed this directly after Tuesday’s quake, urging the public to “remain vigilant” and explicitly referencing the 2016 pattern. “We cannot rule out the possibility that an even larger quake could follow this time as well,” he said. “We urge people to remain on alert.” Government earthquake research assessments suggest that tremors reaching magnitude 7.5 are plausible along the inland section of the Hinagu fault zone. A full rupture of the entire fault could, in the most severe scenario, produce a magnitude 8 event.
That is not a prediction, and it is important to be precise about what the science does and does not say. Seismologists cannot forecast when or whether such a rupture will occur. What they can say is that the geological conditions for a larger event exist, that the 2016 precedent is a legitimate reference point, and that the current sequence has not resolved the underlying stress in the fault system.
Picking Up the Pieces Under Aftershocks
For residents, the immediate challenge is practical and relentless. Ogata told the BBC that she was trying to clean her restaurant on Wednesday so she could reopen as soon as possible, but the aftershocks kept interrupting her. “When I try to work for a bit, an aftershock occurs and I have to stop, then I do some work and we have another aftershock,” she said. “So it is going so slowly. If we keep having this many aftershocks it will be very stressful.”
Yui’s cake shop remains closed while she assesses whether her equipment survived. “I haven’t checked whether the machines such as the oven are working,” she said. “After I check those, I will have an idea whether I can go back to business or not.”
For Malaysia and Singapore, the immediate stakes are limited to the welfare of nationals in the affected region and the monitoring of any disruption to Japanese supply chains, though Kumamoto is not a primary industrial hub in the way that Tokyo or Osaka are. The broader significance of this event is what it illustrates about the compounding nature of seismic risk in the Asia-Pacific. A fault that was partially activated in 2016 has now been disturbed again, and experts are openly saying the worst may not have passed. How Japan manages the next 72 hours, both in its rescue operations and in its public communication about ongoing risk, will be a test of the disaster-preparedness systems that the country has spent decades building and that its neighbours in the region continue to study closely.
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