Tsunami alert in Japan after quake

Japan’s meteorological agency issued a tsunami warning and told the country’s Pacific coast residents to flee to higher ground after a powerful earthquake hit hundreds of miles away on Wednesday.

An official from the town of Shibetsu on Hokkaido told public broadcaster NHK that about 4,000 of the town’s 6,100 residents lived along the coast and had been told to flee.

The quake with a preliminary magnitude of 8.1 struck about 390 km east of the Etorofu islands, which are about 1,600 km northeast of Tokyo, at 6 in the morning, according to the agency.