People visit shops to purchase food and supplies to celebrate the new year in Tokyo's Ueno shopping district on December 30, 2021. Kazuhiro Nogi, AFP/File

HONG KONG — Unfounded online rumors 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.

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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.

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"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 traveling to Japan than last year.

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"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 minimize 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".

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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.

This was followed by a new damage estimate in March from the Cabinet Office, which said a Nankai Trough megaquake and tsunami could cause 298,000 deaths in Japan.

Despite being a routine update of a previous 2014 figure, the estimate appears to have fanned tourists' fears.

A YouTube video featuring a feng shui master urging viewers not to visit Japan, published by local media outlet HK01, has been viewed more than 100,000 times.

Don Hon, one of Hong Kong's 7.5 million residents, does not entirely believe the online claims, but has still been influenced by them.

"I will just take it as a precaution, and won't make any particular plans to travel to Japan," the 32-year-old social worker said.

And if a friend were to ask him to visit Japan in July, Hon "might suggest going somewhere else".

'NO REASON TO WORRY'

Hong Kong-based Greater Bay Airlines has reduced flights to Japan's southern Tokushima region, a local tourism official told AFP.

"The company told us demand has rapidly decreased amid rumors there will be a big quake and tsunami in Japan this summer," she said.

"Three scheduled weekly round-trip flights will be reduced to two round-trips per week from May 12 to October 25."

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The airline is also reducing its flights to Sendai in the northern region of Miyagi.

"There's no reason to worry," Miyagi's governor Yoshihiro Murai reassured travelers, adding that Japanese people are not fleeing.

But "if unscientific rumors on social media are impacting tourism, that would be a major problem", he said last month.

According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, the number of Hong Kong visitors in March stood at 208,400 -- down nearly 10 percent year-on-year.

However, this decline was partly due to the Easter holidays starting in mid-April this year, instead of March, they said.

Hong Kong-based EGL Tours has not seen a massive decline in customers traveling to Japan, its executive director Steve Huen Kwok-chuen said.

But recent bookings at its two hotels in Japan show fewer from Hong Kong guests, while the number from other global destinations remains stable.

In any case, in the likely event that the predictions do not come to pass, "people will realize it's not true", he said.

— By Carina Cheng with Natsuko Fukue in Tokyo, Agence France-Presse

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