At 16:52 on 20 April 2026, a magnitude 7.4 quake struck the Japan Trench about 100 km off Miyako, the same fault behind the 2011 Tōhoku disaster, and the JMA issued a 3-metre tsunami warning. The wave peaked at just 80 cm; onshore there were no deaths, about ten injuries and a few hundred damaged buildings, and the bullet trains ran again the next morning.
By raw size it was bigger than the 2023 quake that killed around 60,000 people in Türkiye and Syria, yet Japan's enforced building codes and tsunami drills turned it into a disruptive afternoon. Its real legacy was a rare JMA advisory warning that the quake had briefly raised the odds of a far larger M8-plus megathrust on the same trench.