All residents in a district in the Noto Peninsula managed to evacuate safely from tsunami waves unleashed by the 7.6 magnitude earthquake on Jan. 1, thanks to years of disaster evacuation drills.
"The drills paid off," said a resident of the Jikeshimode district of Misaki in the city of Suzu, Ishikawa Prefecture, at the tip of the central Japan peninsula.
The district has 90 residents, mostly elderly people. Although many houses collapsed due to the quake, all residents managed to evacuate to higher ground within five minutes.