By Lorraine Chiang
Some Hongkongers have pressed ahead with trips to Japan on Saturday morning despite “slight worries” about a widely discussed prediction that a mega-earthquake will hit the country today.
While travellers told the Post they would pay more attention to the local news, they acknowledged being unprepared for potential earthquakes.
“I felt a little uncomfortable at first, but my son and his wife already got the tickets. It is summer vacation for my grandson, so we seized the chance,” said Ho Wan-chan, a 73-year-old travelling to Nagoya.
The family was among the dozens of Hongkongers waiting to check in at the airport on Sunday morning.
They snatched up round-trip tickets that included one piece of luggage for each person for about HK$1,000 (US$127), which they described as “much cheaper” than usual.
Bonnie Lei, a 40-year-old teacher heading to Tokyo, said she was “slightly worried” about the earthquake because of the predictions.
But she said she eventually decided to go because the discount period coincided with the predictions.
“However, we made zero preparations for the earthquake. The most we do is read the news more frequently,” Lei said.
Her family of four got their tickets during a sale in which they could buy one journey and get another one free. It only cost them about HK$9,000 to visit both Japan and Vietnam.
“My family is not worried about the earthquakes in Kagoshima because we are not on that side,” Lei added.
Song Ci, a 24-year-old student, said she believed the potential of a mega earthquake was slim.
“I feel fine because I think the probability of an earthquake is not that big. Japanese society in general is also quite good at dealing with earthquakes,” she said.
She will stay in Osaka for a week and expects to spend around 2,000 yuan (US$279) for the trip.
In a previous edition of the manga The Future That I Saw, which was published in 1999, author Ryo Tatsuki wrote that there would be a “huge disaster” in March 2011. The artist rose to fame for her prediction that the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami would hit Japan in March and claimed nearly 20,000 lives.
In the revised version of the manga published in 2021, she predicted that an even larger-scale quake was set to happen on July 5 this year.
Over the past two weeks, the Japan Meteorological Agency has recorded a series of more than 1,000 quakes in Kagoshima prefecture, leading to the evacuation of a village in the area.
As the Tohoku earthquake started with a series of small quakes, many drew parallels between the last mega earthquake and the latest prediction by the manga artist.
But Japanese authorities have dismissed the claims, saying that earthquakes cannot be predicted accurately and can occur anywhere at any time, even outside the country.