by Shigemi Sato
TOKYO - A powerful earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale rocked the southern Japanese island of Kyushu Sunday, killing at least one person and injuring more than 400 others, officials and press reports said.
The quake, which occurred at 10:53 am (0153 GMT), also collapsed houses and roads, caused landslides and disrupted land and air traffic.
The Meteorological Agency immediately issued tsunami warnings but lifted them one hour later after detecting no significant rise in the tide.
"The fault was caused by the crust`s horizontal shift. If the fault was vertical, it would have triggered tsunamis," said Toshikazu Hirai, a seismic expert at the government agency.
A 75 year-old woman died after she was crushed by a falling block wall in Fukuoka, a major city on the island`s northern coast, a municipal official told AFP by telephone, saying: "She suffered internal bleeding and a fractured pelvis".
More than 400 people received treatment at hospitals for injuries, mostly caused by shards from shattered window panes and falling objects, the Kyodo news agency reported.
Nine hours after the tremor, police confirmed the one death and 136 injuries, 10 of them serious.
A spokesman for the Fukuoka prefectural police headquarters said 510 houses had been destroyed or partially damaged and roads were cracked at 62 spots. There were also nine landslides.
Train operations and airplane flights were temporarily suspended for inspections of tracks and runways.
He said a crack, two centimeters (0.8-inch) wide and 100 meters (yards) long, was found on a road near Fukuoka Dome, a seaside baseball park. The surface of the road also buckled out 30 centimeters (12 inches) at one point.
Glass splinters cascaded down from an office building in Fukuoka`s downtown business district, sending passersby rushing away in panic, according to television footage on the Japan Broadcasting Corp.
The public network also showed children and adults scrambling for cover at a traditional festival for girls in the canal city of Yanagawa and at a kindergarten graduation ceremony in Fukuoka.
Ten people were injured on the islet of Genkai at the mouth of Hakata (Fukuoka) Bay as landslides and heavy jolts crushed more than 20 houses, a local official said.
"There was an awful jolt and it rolled for a while, dragging down the chest of drawers and the cupboard in the kitchen at my house," Chizumi Nakamura, secretary of the Genkai community centre, told AFP by telephone.
She said 500 children, elderly people and women among the 750 islanders are being evacuated to the city as aftershocks continued.
The meteorological agency detected more than 74 aftershocks within seven hours of the quake, whose was located in waters some 20 kilometers (13 miles) Fukuoka. Its focus was only nine kilometers (six miles) below surface.
Akikichi Matsuzaki, a 50-year-old fisherman on Genkai who was aboard his boat when the quake struck, told Jiji Press, "I heard an enormous bang from the seabed. We felt a shock as if the boat`s bottom bumped a big thing. The boat swayed greatly."
The tremor was also felt in the south of the Korean peninsula.
Residents were forced to evacuate buildings in Busan, a key port city some 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Seoul, the South Korean Yonhap news agency said. There were no reports of injuries or damage.
It was the biggest earthquake to hit Japan since a magnitude-6.8 quake rattled the Niigata region, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Tokyo on October 23, leaving 40 people dead.
The Niigata disaster was the deadliest in quake-prone Japan since January 17, 1995, when 6,433 people died after a pre-dawn tremor in the western port city of Kobe.
03/20/2005 11:49 GMT