A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto prefecture in southwestern Japan, and by Wednesday morning the death toll had risen to 13. Rescue teams are still digging under the rubble and the race against time continues.

The epicentre was around 20 kilometres south of the city of Kumamoto, home to about 700,000 people, on the island of Kyushu. Authorities issued an evacuation order for roughly 260,000 people. That is more than the entire population of Skopje, put in motion within a few hours.

The shopping centre that split in half

The hardest image comes from the Aeon shopping centre, one side of which has collapsed entirely. Eight people were pulled from the rubble of the commercial building in the early hours of Wednesday. Two women in their twenties died when an explosion of still undetermined origin destroyed part of the centre, about an hour after the earthquake itself. Local media report that authorities are investigating whether it was a gas explosion. On Wednesday morning another 20 to 30 employees at the centre were listed as missing.

At the Nippon Paper Industries factory a chimney collapsed. Seven people are missing, four seriously injured. That is the second site being dug at the same time, with rescuers working in temperatures expected to reach around 34 degrees during the day.

When the hospital loses power

More than 36,000 households were left without electricity. One hospital near the epicentre described itself as „almost a field hospital” after the power went out. Another stopped taking new emergency cases after treating 86 injured people. This is Japan, a country whose seismic standards are among the strictest in the world, with regular evacuation drills and building codes written with earthquakes in mind. Despite all of it, the hospitals fill up within hours.

Honda and Tokyo Electron halted production until Wednesday. TSMC evacuated workers from its local plant but restarted production the same evening, while the digging under the rubble was still going on.

Twenty percent of the world's earthquakes

Japan sits on the so-called Ring of Fire and accounts for around 20 percent of all earthquakes in the world of magnitude 6.0 or greater. Kumamoto already knows this feeling: in 2016 an earthquake in the same prefecture took 275 lives and left 2,739 injured.

The Balkans know this scene by heart. Skopje 1963, Bitola, Valandovo, Durres and Tirana in 2019. The difference is that in Japan every earthquake is followed by a revision of the codes, and the question left open is whether here a disaster changes only the rhetoric, or the building practice too.