When the ground began to shake on New Year’s Day 2024 during an afternoon walk with her mother in the small city of Nanao on central Honshu’s Noto Peninsula, tour guide Kaho Shoji wasn’t overly concerned.
“Earthquakes happen all the time,” says the 47-year-old. But when the main shock came several minutes later, at 4.10pm, she knew it was serious. “We couldn’t stand up straight,” Kaho recalls. “Branches were falling down… and it was so loud, like roaring.”
But Kaho and her family, who had gathered at her mother’s home in Nanao to celebrate the new year, were lucky. The 7.5-magnitude earthquake (7.6 on Japan’s own shindo intensity scale), and the tsunami that struck the peninsula’s northeast coast within minutes, reaching heights of 21.8 feet, claimed more than 500 lives. Together, they also damaged or destroyed more than 107,000 homes across Japan’s mostly rural Ishikawa Prefecture, where over 30 percent of the population is over 65.
A year on, Kaho is sharing her story as our group of eight prepares to set off on a coastal stroll on a new tour developed by Walk Japan in the wake of the disaster. Our guide Kaho, who has worked with the company for a decade, was central to its development of the four-night Onsen Gastronomy: Noto tour, which has its first public departure in April 2025.
