Old Japan tsunami clip recirculates with altered audio after 2024 earthquake

"The earthquake in Japan on January 1, 2024, caused a tsunami with a wave height of 5 meters. Tsunami in real-time." reads the sticker text written in simplified Chinese of a clip shared on Douyin, the Chinese version of the video-sharing app TikTok, on January 2, 2024.

The 30-second video shows cars on the river bank being swept away and swallowed up by the rushing water. The sound of people screaming can also be heard.

This clip surfaced online after a devastating 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck central Japan on New Year's Day, which has killed at least 92 people and left at least 242 missing, regional authorities said.

The powerful main tremor, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, injured at least 330 people.

The main jolt triggered waves at least 1.2 metres (four feet) high in the port town of Wajima, and a series of smaller tsunamis were reported elsewhere.

Image

A screenshot taken on January 4, 2024 of the false post.

The same video was also shared and viewed thousands of times on social media platform X and Chinese social media sites Douyin and Weibo. 

However, the posts share an old video that has been manipulated to insert the sound of people screaming.

The original clip shows a tsunami triggered by the massive 9.0-magnitude undersea quake off northeastern Japan in March 2011, which left around 18,500 people dead or missing. 

Old footage

A Google reverse image search found a longer video that includes the same footage published on YouTube by an account called Photo Studio Midorikawa on March 13, 2011 (archived link).

The video's Japanese-language caption says it was filmed on March 11, 2011 in Iwaki City in Fukushima.

The 2011 earthquake remains the worst natural disaster in the country's living memory. It caused a deadly tsunami with waves hitting with such force that homes were destroyed right down to their foundations in many places, leaving areas that were once thriving communities almost entirely featureless.

The clip featured in the false post corresponds to the first 30 seconds of this three-minute and 11-second clip on YouTube. Instead of screaming, only the sound of flooding can be heard in the original clip.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the clip shared in the false post (left) and the video on YouTube (right):

Image

Screenshot comparisons of the video shared in a false post (left) and the original footage published on YouTube by Takayuki Midorikawa (right)

The area shown in the video is the Shimukawa Bridge in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture (archived link).

Below are screenshot comparisons of the video shared with the false claim on Douyin (left) and the Google Street View image (right), with similarities marked by AFP:

Image

Screenshot comparison of the original footage published on YouTube by Takayuki Midorikawa (left) and images from Google Maps (right)

AFP has debunked other false posts linking old clips to the latest earthquake in Japan here and here.