Aftershocks Hit Japan a Day After Quake

A woman walks by a damaged residence in Wajima, northern Japan, after an earthquake hit along the country's Sea of Japan coast on Sunday morning. (AP)

The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said most of the injuries and damage were concentrated in the city of Wajima, about 193 miles northwest of Tokyo.

Takeshi Hachimine, seismology and tsunami section chief at the Meteorological Agency, said the affected area was not considered earthquake-prone. The last major quake to cause casualties there was in 1933, when three people died.

Thousands of homes were still without water service, but electrical power had been nearly completely restored, media reports said.

Western Japan Railway Co. said it had restored most of its train service around the region. The local airport also resumed operations after it closed to check cracks on its runway.

Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. The last major quake to hit the capital, Tokyo, killed some 142,000 people in 1923, and experts say the capital has a 90 percent chance of suffering a major quake in the next 50 years.

In October 2004, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit northern Japan, killing 40 people and damaging more than 6,000 homes. It was the deadliest to hit Japan since 1995, when a magnitude-7.2 quake killed 6,433 people in the western city of Kobe.

Powerful quakes in 1703, 1782, 1812 and 1855 also caused vast damage in the capital.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the epicenter of Sunday's quake was 225 miles northwest of Tokyo. The USGS measured its magnitude at 6.7.

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Associated Press writers Hans Greimel, Carl Freire and Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.