AP News, April 14th, 2007
A moderate earthquake jolted central Japan on Sunday, injuring at least five people, damaging houses and a 400-year-old castle, police and officials said.
The 5.4-magnitude quake hit at 12:19 p.m. local time and was centered in Mie prefecture, about 200 miles southwest of Tokyo, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
About six hours later, a magnitude-4.5 temblor believed to be an aftershock struck the area, Japan's Meteorological Agency reported.
A woman and a man suffered minor head and shoulder injuries at a roadside restaurant in Kameyama city when part of a ceiling fell on them. Elsewhere in the Mie province, three people received minor leg and arm injuries, prefectural official Yoshihisa Ito said.
The quake also caused part of a stone wall to collapse at the more than 400-year-old Kameyama Castle, but nobody was injured, according to local police. Several houses were partially damaged.
Authorities briefly suspended high-speed bullet trains and other train services and closed roads to perform safety checks, but transport services quickly resumed, Ito said.
Sunday's temblor was not related to a pair of fairly powerful quakes Saturday _ one near a remote island in the Pacific Ocean south of Tokyo and another one off the northeastern coast of Ibaraki, meteorological official Kazumitsu Yoshikawa said.
In March, a magnitude-6.9 quake in northwestern Japan killed one person and injured more than 200 others.
Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. In 1995, a magnitude-7.2 quake killed 6,433 people in the western city of Kobe.
