Unfounded online rumours warning that a huge earthquake will soon strike Japan are taking a toll on travel firms and airlines who report less demand from worried Hong Kongers.
People from Hong Kong made nearly 2.7 million trips to Japan in 2024.
Although it is impossible to know exactly when earthquakes will hit, fear-inducing predictions have spread widely among the city’s residents.
Some of the false posts cite a Japanese manga comic, republished in 2021, which predicts a major natural disaster in July 2025 — based on the author’s dream.
Other posts give different dates, while a Facebook group that claims to predict disasters in Japan has over a quarter of a million members, mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“The earthquake prophecy has absolutely caused a big change to our customers’ preferences,” said Frankie Chow, head of Hong Kong travel agency CLS Holiday.
Chow told AFP that in March and April his company received 70-80 percent fewer inquiries about travelling to Japan than last year.
“I’ve never experienced this before,” said Chow, who also runs the booking website Flyagain.la.
While some people changed their destination, others “did not dare to travel”, he said.
Mild to moderate earthquakes are common in Japan, where strict building codes minimise damage, even from larger shakes.
But the nation is no stranger to major disasters, including in 2011 when a magnitude-9.0 quake triggered a tsunami that left 18,500 people dead or missing and caused a devastating meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Earthquakes are very rarely felt in Hong Kong, but some people are easily spooked by disinformation, Chow said.
– ‘Megaquake’ warning –
Last month, Tokyo’s Cabinet Office said on social media platform X: “Predicting earthquakes by date, time and place is not possible based on current scientific knowledge.”
A Cabinet Office official told AFP that the X post was part of its usual information-sharing about earthquakes.
But Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily reported that it was responding to prophecies that sprung up online after a Japanese government panel in January released a new estimate for the probability of a “megaquake”.
The panel said the chance of a massive earthquake along the undersea Nankai Trough south of Japan in the next three decades had marginally increased to 75-82 percent.
