An earthquake 70 kilometres under southern Ibaraki shook Tokyo's 23 wards, and the injury figure of 37 is two numbers from two different reporting channels added together
Thirty seven is not a number Japan's fire agency prints.
Its fifth report on the earthquake that struck beneath southern Ibaraki Prefecture at two o'clock on Sunday morning carries a table of casualties reported by the prefectures themselves. That table totals 22 injured, one of them seriously, spread across Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa. Nobody was killed. Nobody is missing, and the entire housing damage column holds a single entry, one partially damaged building in Saitama.
Below the table, under a heading that reads simply "other", sits a separate line. Tokyo, 15 injured, all slightly, attributed to fire service information rather than to a prefectural return. Add that line to the table and the figure is 37.
The distinction is the agency's, not this desk's, and it is the reason the two numbers are kept apart. Prefectural returns and fire service reporting are different channels arriving at different speeds. The report says on its own face that it is provisional and that the figures may still change.
What the Meteorological Agency measured
Magnitude 5.9, at 36.0 north and 140.1 east, 70 kilometres down.
That depth is what spread the shaking. The agency recorded shindo 5-lower, the fifth step on its seven-level intensity scale, across five regions: northern and southern Ibaraki, southern Saitama, north-western Chiba, and the 23 wards of Tokyo. Shindo 4 reached a good deal further, into Fukushima, Tochigi, Gunma, both Kanagawas and the eastern Tama district.
An Earthquake Early Warning was issued. There was no tsunami risk, and the agency said so in the same bulletin.
The fire agency's municipal list narrows the Tokyo entry to one ward, Adachi, which sits inside the 23 the Meteorological Agency named. Ten Ibaraki municipalities reached the same level, Tsukuba and Toride among them, along with four in Saitama and two in Chiba.
What the fire agency did
At 02:00, the minute the earthquake happened, the agency stood up its own Disaster Response Headquarters under the Director-General of the Civil Protection and Disaster Management Department, at second-tier emergency posture. One minute later it asked every prefecture that had recorded shindo 5-lower to respond appropriately and to report damage.
The rest of the report is a list of things that did not go wrong. Every 119 emergency dispatch centre named in Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba and Tokyo is recorded as operating normally. No damage has been reported to important facilities. No prefecture has opened a disaster response headquarters of its own.
One line in the casualty table does not sit where the intensity map suggests it should. Kanagawa recorded shindo 4, a step below the five regions that took the worst of it, and reported eight injuries, including the single serious one in the whole country.
