Live reporting for DW on tsunami after Kamchatka quake
The first advisories in the morning of 30 July 2025 were somewhat concerning, but did not seem too alarming – tsunamis of several ten centimeters, they said. Dangerous, but manageable with all the precautions in place in Japan.
That changed an hour later, when all of a sudden, Japan warned that the tsunamis could reach up to three meters – which is a very different story! For comparison: The world’s strongest earthquake in Chile in 1960 caused tsunamis between 2 and 6 meters in Japan, killing 182 people.
Between 80 and 130 centimeters were recorded today. Something to watch out for in the future: The first waves were lower, not more than 40 centimeters! The higher ones arrived maybe 5 or 6 hours after the earthquake in Kamchatka. For comparison: Just 30 centimeters will knock even a strong and healthy person off their feet.
So I spent the day today doing live reports for the English service of Deutsche Welle on the tsunami warnings in Japan, due to which almost two million people were asked to evacuate to higher ground, during sweltering heat. One of the reports is this one (my reporting from 7:20):
On the morning of 31 July 2025, the sense of crisis of the day before had mostly subsided, despite tsunami advisories still being in place in the Tohoku and Hokkaido regions, and a small part of the south of Japan. However, those were finally lifted in the late afternoon.
At midday, DW asked me to comment on how Japan had dealt with the tsunami, and what kind of challenges a country faces in such a situation. The biggest challenge this time was undoubtedly the combination of severe summer heat with the fact that many evacuation areas are not indoors, but outside. Hokkaido not being used to such high temperatures has a much lower rate of air-conditioning than the rest of the country.
Also – what would have happened, if two million people had been asked to evacuate during a typhoon, or during winter, when much of the north is covered in meters of snow…?
For more, watch the full DW report of several contributors (my reporting from 6:05) here: