Japan’s earthquake emergency report miscalculated 9.9 and frightened the public. The Meteorological Agency held three press conferences to explain

At around 12:40 noon on the 16th, the Japan Meteorological Agency issued an emergency earthquake warning for a wide area from Hokkaido to the East China Sea. It predicted that there would be strong shaking, but it was urgently canceled eight minutes later. The source of this false alarm was presumed to be the Kuril Islands, with a magnitude of 9.9. In fact, it was a magnitude 6.9 earthquake near the Kamchatka Peninsula, causing transportation agencies to be affected. The Meteorological Agency confirmed that this was the first time that the emergency earthquake warning "alert" level had been revoked and apologized for this.

The Meteorological Agency held a press conference for the third time that night to explain the reasons, pointing out that data from long-distance observation points that should have been excluded were used incorrectly, leading to an overestimation of the scale. In the past, in the 2020 Torishima offshore earthquake, overestimation was also caused by using data that were too far away from the earthquake source. Therefore, the Meteorological Agency has set that observation data beyond 700 kilometers from the earthquake source will not be included in the scale calculation. However, this setting did not work properly this time, and data about 1,800 kilometers away from the presumed earthquake source was used.

The Meteorological Agency admitted that this was due to human error and has taken emergency measures. In addition, the Meteorological Agency also misjudged the location of the earthquake source, which was more than 600 kilometers away from the actual location, resulting in an overestimation of the scale. When later estimating the shaking, another location closer to Japan was used as the earthquake source calculation, which further caused the shaking to be too large. The relevant details are still under investigation.

Shigeki Aoki, the head of the Investigation Section, bowed and apologized at the press conference, saying, "This wrong announcement of an emergency earthquake warning has caused great trouble and burden to the people. I deeply apologize." He also emphasized that relevant personnel have been dealt with and called on the public to take life-saving actions as usual when receiving emergency earthquake warnings in the future.