2007 Noto earthquake

What Happened

On 25 March 2007, an earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula (能登半島, Noto Hantō) in Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast of central Honshu. The event is recorded under the name 2007 Noto earthquake, and its epicentre is placed at coordinates 37.3° north, 136.5° east — a point in the waters off the tip of the peninsula.

The shaking was felt across the Hokuriku region, the coastal district that includes Ishikawa, Toyama and Fukui prefectures. The date fell in the nineteenth year of the Heisei era, the reign period of Emperor Akihito that ran from 1989 to 2019.

Background

The Noto Peninsula juts northward into the Sea of Japan, separated from the rest of Ishikawa Prefecture by a narrow neck of land. Its economy has long rested on fishing, rice and coastal shipping, and its more remote villages sit on steep ground where roads and houses cling to the shoreline.

Japan sits on the boundary of four tectonic plates, and the Hokuriku coast has a long record of destructive earthquakes. The peninsula's name — Noto — appears in some of the oldest surviving Japanese poetry and gazetteers, and the region's settlements are old enough that many of their streets and retaining walls predate modern seismic engineering.

The 2007 event belongs to the Heisei period, an era name that Japanese calendars still use alongside the Western year. Under that system, 2007 is Heisei 19.

Why It Mattered

The earthquake drew national attention to a part of Japan that rarely makes headlines. The Noto Peninsula is one of the country's more thinly populated regions, with an ageing population and a road network that offers few alternative routes when the main coastal highway is cut. Damage to that infrastructure isolates communities quickly.

The event also reinforced a pattern that seismologists had been documenting along the Sea of Japan coast: damaging earthquakes in the Hokuriku region are not confined to the great subduction-zone events that dominate public attention further east. The 2007 Noto earthquake became a reference point for later seismic hazard planning in Ishikawa Prefecture.

The peninsula's name returned to international news in 2024, when a far more destructive earthquake struck the same region on 1 January. For many readers outside Japan, the 2007 event is encountered as the earlier of the two Noto earthquakes.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 能登半島地震, read in kana as のとはんとうじしん, and written in romaji as Noto Hantō Jishin.

Broken down character by character:

能 — read の (no) in this word. The character means "ability", "skill" or "talent" in its everyday senses. Here it functions purely as a phonetic and historical place name element; it carries no meaning of ability in this context. 能登 as a whole is the name of the peninsula, attested in Japanese records for well over a thousand years.

登 — read と (to) in this word. The character means "to climb", "to ascend" or "to register". As with 能, its meaning is not active in the place name; 能登 is written with these two characters as a fixed unit.

半 — read はん (han). The character means "half". It appears in many Japanese compounds where something is divided or partial.

島 — read とう (tō) in this word, though its more familiar reading is しま (shima). The character means "island". In 半島 the two characters combine to mean "peninsula" — literally a "half island". The reading とう is the Sino-Japanese (on'yomi) pronunciation, used when characters combine into compound words.

地 — read じ (ji). The character means "ground", "earth" or "land". It is one of the most common characters in Japanese geography and geology vocabulary.

震 — read しん (shin). The character means "to shake" or "tremble". Combined with 地, it forms 地震 (jishin), the standard Japanese word for "earthquake".

So the full name parses as: 能登 (Noto, the place) + 半島 (hantō, peninsula) + 地震 (jishin, earthquake) — "the Noto Peninsula earthquake". Japanese news media name earthquakes this way as a matter of convention, combining the place with 地震, which is why the same three-part pattern recurs across the country's seismic history.

Key Figures

• Date: 25 March 2007
• Era: Heisei 19 (平成19年), within the Heisei period, 1989–2019
• Epicentre: 37.3° N, 136.5° E — off the Noto Peninsula, Ishikawa Prefecture
• Region affected: Hokuriku, on the Sea of Japan coast of central Honshu
• Prefecture: Ishikawa
• Japanese name: 能登半島地震 (のとはんとうじしん / Noto Hantō Jishin)