Moderate quake shakes Japan's Honshu: USGS

A moderate 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the south coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu, US geologists said today, but no tsunami warning was issued.

A moderate 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the south coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu, US geologists said on Monday, but no tsunami warning was issued.

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The tremor, which hit just before midnight, hit at a depth of around 22 kilometres (14 miles), around 34 kilometres south of Shizuoka and 162 kilometres south of Tokyo, the US Geological Survey said.

The epicentre of the quake was a considerable distance from the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan on March 11, generating a massive tsunami that wiped out whole stretches of the country's northeast coast, leavving more than 20,000 people dead or missing.

Thousands more were made homeless when a nuclear reactor began melting down after its cooling systems were swamped by the waves in the worst atomic disaster the world has seen for a quarter of a century.

Japan, located at the junction of four tectonic plates, experiences 20 percent of the strongest quakes recorded on Earth each year.