By Yoko Kubota
TOKYO (Reuters) - A strong earthquake jolted northern Japanearly on Thursday, injuring several people, burying three carsunder a landslide and cutting off electric power to at least10,000 homes, media reports and officials said.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said there was no threat ofa tsunami from the quake, which had a preliminary magnitude of6.8 and could be felt as far away as Tokyo.
The focus of the quake was 120 km (75 miles) below thesurface of the earth in Iwate prefecture, a mountainous,sparsely populated region, the agency said.
"It was shaking so much that I almost couldn't step out ofthe kitchen and I panicked quite a bit. A lot of dishes broke,"a man in Hachinohe city in Aomori prefecture, about 550 kmnortheast of Tokyo, told national broadcaster NHK.
Japanese media said military planes were flying over thearea to try to assess the extent of damage and that localauthorities had requested troops be sent to the area to help.Defence Ministry officials could not immediately be reached forcomment.
"I don't have concrete information, but we've heard thatthere are several injured," Shinya Izumi, minister in charge ofdisaster management, told a news conference after thegovernment set up an emergency task force at the primeminister's office.
Private broadcaster TV Asahi quoted a spokesman for ahospital in Hachinohe, a city with a population of about240,000 some 550 km northeast of Tokyo, as saying that 13people had been brought in with injuries, but gave no detailson their condition.
Broadcaster TBS said 55 had been injured, while NHK put thefigure at 18.
There was a fire in one building in the area after thequake, and NHK's fixed cameras showed fire engines drivingthrough the streets towards the scene of the blaze, which itreported was soon put out.
Some parts of highways had been closed to traffic and somerail lines were stopped after the quake in the region, which isa mountainous and sparsely populated part of Japan, NHKreported.
"First it shook a little, then a strong shaking came. Itshook for quite a long time," a civil servant in Iwate toldNHK.
"Things didn't fall off the shelves. I saw some houses withshattered glass," he said.
Tohoku Electric said its nuclear facilities in the areawere operating normally after the quake, except for one unitthat was already off-line for maintenance work.
Tokyo Electric said its nuclear plants further south hadnot been affected.
Nippon Oil said its 145,000 barrels per day Sendai refinerywas operating normally after quake, but Tohoku Electric said ithad manually shut down a 250-megawatt oil-fired power plant inAomori after the quake.
Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the world's mostseismically active areas. The country accounts for about 20percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.
Thursday's quake follows a string of earthquakes in thesame region, the first of which in mid-June killed at least 10people and left as many again missing.
In October 2004, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8struck the Niigata region in northern Japan, killing 65 peopleand injuring more than 3,000.
That was the deadliest quake since a magnitude 7.3 tremorhit the city of Kobe in 1995, killing more than 6,400.
(Reporting by Linda Sieg and Yoko Kubota; Additionalreporting by Isabel Reynolds and Osamu Tsukimori; Writing byChris Gallagher; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
