TOKYO — A powerful earthquake struck northern Japan on Monday, injuring at least 78 people, starting fires and damaging buildings throughout the region.
The earthquake, reported to have a magnitude of 7.0, caused no fatalities but frightened many and disrupted services in a broad swath of northern Japan. The Tohoku Electric Power Co. said an 825,000-kilowatt nuclear reactor, its Onagawa No. 3 unit, which is situated near the epicenter in northern Japan, automatically shut down.
Of those hurt, 49 were injured in landslides.
The temblor, which was the strongest earthquake to hit Japan in two years, was powerful enough to be strongly felt 280 miles away, in Tokyo, where tall buildings were shaken for several minutes, street lamps swayed and elevators in some buildings ceased operating when the seismic activity began, at 6:24 p.m. The prime minister of Norway, Kjell Magne Bondevik, who was on a state visit to Japan, was evacuated from his Tokyo hotel room.
"First I ran out in the corridor without my shoes, but then I decided it was best to put them on," Bondevik said.
In northern Japan, about 35,000 homes temporarily lost power, but electricity was quickly restored for most customers. Rail service throughout the region was also temporarily suspended, and amid the panic, telephone networks were briefly overwhelmed with communications traffic.
Experts said the earthquake's power was muted by the location of its epicenter, which was not only 20 miles offshore of the Miyagi prefecture, on the northeastern Pacific coast, but 40 miles beneath the Earth's surface. The depth of the seismic activity also eliminated the risk of tsunamis, or huge sea waves.
Japan's last major earthquake was in Kobe in 1995. That tremor, which measured 7.2, killed more than 6,000 people.