A small tsunami wave has hit Japan's northeastern coastline, officials say, after a strong earthquake rocked the region a year on from the country's worst post-war natural disaster.
Today's 20cm wave and 6.8 magnitude quake, which struck around 210km off the northern island of Hokkaido, prompted local authorities to issue an evacuation warning for coastal residents before it hit land.
Japan's meteorological agency also confirmed that an earlier 10cm wave had hit land.
The waves hit two locations in Aomori prefecture, which was one of the areas in Japan's northeast devastated by last year's disaster.
The agency had initially said a tsunami could be as high as 50cm, but US monitors said there was no Pacific-wide tsunami threat.
The quake struck at a relatively shallow 10km below the seabed at 6.09pm local time (8.09pm AEDT).
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology said the tsunami posed no threat to mainland Australia, its islands or territories.
The tsunami warning - which was lifted at 9.40pm - comes after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a monster wave on March 11 last year that killed more than 19,000 people and crippled Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
The tsunami swamped cooling systems at the Fukushima site and sent three reactors into meltdown, spewing radiation into the environment and sparking the world's worst atomic accident in a generation.
There were no immediate reports of damage at nuclear facilities in the area affected by today's quake.
A spokesman for Tohoku Electric Power, which operates two nuclear power plants in the country's northeast, said the facilities were unaffected.
"There was no damage to our nuclear power facilities following the earthquake," he told AFP.
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