The earthquake came at ten past two on Sunday morning, deep under Ibaraki Prefecture, and by breakfast the capital had already counted itself. The meteorological agency located the epicenter in southern Ibaraki at a depth of 70 kilometers, estimated the magnitude at 5.9, and reported no tsunami. [1] Shaking registered lower 5 on Japan's intensity scale across 17 municipalities spanning four prefectures — Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba and metropolitan Tokyo — waking a megalith of thirty-seven million people at the hour when reflexes are slowest. [2]

Forty-five people were injured, according to the Fuji News Network's tally from fire and disaster-management authorities: 22 in Tokyo, nine each in Saitama and Kanagawa, most hurt by falling objects and stumbles in darkened rooms; a woman in her eighties in Yokohama was seriously injured falling from her bed. [2] Nikkei's morning edition counted 37 injured as of mid-morning, its number climbing through the afternoon as reports arrived. [1] No collapsed buildings, no fatalities, no tsunami warning — a major quake measured, for once, almost entirely in bruises. The oddities tell the story of a city shaking at the hour nothing is braced: in Tokyo's Adachi ward, a store's fire-suppression system malfunctioned in the shaking and blanketed the shop and sidewalk in white extinguishant foam, calling out firefighters to a disaster that was only a false alarm. [2]

What repays attention is how the machine responded, because that machinery is invisible until 2 a.m. puts it to the test. Railways suspended service on key lines including the Keihin-Tohoku and Joban routes while inspectors walked the track, disrupting more than 150,000 journeys before the morning run resumed section by section. [2] Tokyo's fire department logged six people trapped in elevators and eight behind doors that refused to open, small failures that explain why every building manager in the capital spent the morning pressing test buttons. Around a hundred households reported lost water service in the eastern wards. [2] Each is trivial alone; together they are the census of what actually breaks when the ground moves, which is never the skyscrapers but the hinges.

The agency's guidance carried the weekend's real instruction: expect more shaking for roughly a week, especially the next two or three days, at intensities similar to Sunday morning's. [1] Deep quakes of this kind rattle a wide footprint precisely because their energy travels far through the slab, and a 70-kilometer hypocenter spares the surface nothing at this magnitude. The advice is unfashionably boring — brace furniture, check the elderly, know where your shoes are — and it is also the entire difference between 45 injuries and a different number.

By evening the platforms had emptied of inspectors and filled with phone cameras, the ritual documentation of every Japanese quake now circulating within minutes. [2] The capital passed a Sunday-morning audit it has trained for since childhood, and the grade was posted in injuries rather than drama: shaken, bruised, running on time by noon. The ground will try again within days. It usually does.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo