A magnitude 7.0 earthquake has struck deep beneath the Pacific Ocean near Japan's remote Ogasawara Islands, about 1,000km (620 miles) south of Tokyo, with no threat of a tsunami, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The preliminary magnitude was recorded at around 11.10am local time (2.10am GMT) on Sunday, in waters west of the island chain and at a depth of about 470km (290 miles), the agency said.
The quake measured 3 on Japan's seismic intensity scale, which runs from 0 to 7, on the islands of Chichijima and Hahajima, the two inhabited islands of the group. The Ogasawara Islands, also known as the Bonin Islands, are administered by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
Earlier, European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said that a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the Bonin Islands.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
Despite the distance, the tremor was felt across a wide area of eastern and north-eastern Japan, Kyodo News reported, because seismic waves are believed to have travelled through the Pacific plate, one of the large slabs of the Earth's crust.
The islands lie in the seismically active Izu-Bonin-Mariana region of the western Pacific, where the Pacific plate moves beneath the Philippine Sea plate.
Japan sits where four tectonic plates meet, and about 10 per cent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher strike in or around the country. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 left 22,303 people dead or missing, including deaths from disaster-related causes. In July, an earthquake in Kumamoto prefecture in the southwest killed at least 30 people.
Deep earthquakes off the Ogasawara Islands can be felt far away.
A magnitude 7.9 quake at a depth of 664km in 2015 was felt across almost all of Japan and stopped elevators in Tokyo, though it killed no one. The government has warned there is a 70 to 80 per cent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 earthquake on the Nankai Trough, a subduction zone off the south coast, within 30 years.
