NAGANO (AFP) - A powerful earthquake rattled Japan on Monday, killing two people and injuring more than 260 others as it toppled houses, triggered mudslides and set off a blaze at a nuclear power plant.
In the hardest-hit areas northwest of the capital Tokyo, houses were reduced to rubble and a bridge was nearly cracked in two by the force of the mid-morning quake, which had a magnitude of 6.8.
"I felt myself swaying from side to side. I was in shock," said Hitomi Mitsui, a 23-year-old businesswoman in Nagano, a city in Japan's central mountains that suffered some damage.
The government set up a crisis management centre after the quake, which was strong enough to shake skyscrapers in the capital more than 200 kilometres (125 miles) away from the epicentre.
Monday was a bank holiday in Japan, so financial markets were closed.
Officials said they were hunting for survivors after the quake, which triggered 50-centimetre (20-inch) tsunami waves that hit the Japanese coast within minutes. Several aftershocks followed.
"When the earthquake hit, I was out on my boat and I felt this swing," said Susumu Ishiguro, the owner of a fishing gear shop in the worst-hit city of Kashiwazaki on the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
"I came back to the port and I found my house was a complete mess. I think all the old houses got crushed," he said by telephone.
Service on Japan's famed bullet trains was temporarily suspended as a precaution while Niigata airport temporarily closed its runways to check for damage.
Television footage showed flames shooting out of a nuclear power plant in Kashiwazaki although there was no apparent risk of a radiation leak.
Plant officials said the fire broke out in the area that supplies electricity to the facility and that the four reactors automatically shut down following the jolt.
"The fire occurred at a transformer, which is not located close to the reactors," said Yasushi Hasegawa, an official of the firm that runs the facility.
Two women, both in their 80s, died after sustaining injuries in the quake, said an official at Kashiwazaki Chuo Hospital.
Another 260 people were injured and 440 others were evacuated to shelters, public broadcaster NHK said. Some 21,000 households suffered power cuts.
The quake also triggered mudslides in Kashiwazaki, where soil was already loose after a major typhoon at the weekend, which left four people dead or missing and flooded hundreds of homes across Japan.
On the Japanese scale which measures seismic intensity, the earthquake registered upper-six out of seven, meaning it has the potential to knock over furniture and break window-panes.
Japan lies at the junction of four tectonic plates and endures about 20 percent of the world's most powerful earthquakes.
Niigata was the scene of a major earthquake in October 2004, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale. Sixty-seven people were killed, including those who suffered stress and fatigue afterwards.
The 2004 Niigata earthquake was Japan's deadliest since January 1995, when a 7.3-magnitude tremor destroyed much of the western metropolis of Kobe, killing more than 6,400 people.