By Hisako Ueno, Yan Zhuang and John Yoon
Tropical storm Shanshan lashed southern Japan with record rainfall and powerful winds Thursday, flooding towns, knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes, disrupting travel and forcing more than 4 million evacuations.
The storm, the strongest to hit Japan this year, had maximum sustained winds of up to 52 mph and gusts of 63 mph late Thursday, according to the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which downgraded Shanshan from a typhoon to a tropical storm Thursday evening.
Shanshan had peaked at a strength equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane before making landfall as a typhoon around 8 a.m. on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. It was forecast to move north through Kyushu before shifting east Friday and Saturday, moving farther inland and losing strength.
The storm was weakening as it moved slowly inland, but authorities issued warnings for landslides and floods in many parts of southwestern Japan. More than 4.1 million people were under evacuation orders nationwide, Japan’s Cabinet Office said Thursday.
“This is one of the biggest typhoons in recent years, for a prefecture that experiences many typhoons every year,” Kensei Tomisako, a disaster response official in Satsumasendai, said in an interview.
Shanshan has brought record rainfall. Some parts of Kyushu recorded 2.6 feet of rain in 48 hours, forecasters said. The storm, moving northeast at just 9 mph late Thursday, lashed some areas with rain for hours.
Three people died after a landslide Tuesday buried their home in Gamagori, a city in central Japan that was hit by heavy rain, the local government said early Thursday. Another person died after a roof collapsed in Kamiita Town, according to Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK.
More than 80 people were injured in the storm, and one person was missing, the news agency said. More than 119,000 households were without power late Thursday in Kyushu, the service provider Kyushu Electric Power Transmission and Distribution said.
Japan Airlines, one of the country’s largest airlines, canceled all flights to and from Nagasaki and seven other cities in Shanshan’s path on Thursday and said that many flights to and from 20 cities across the country Friday had already been canceled. All Nippon Airways also canceled all flights that had been scheduled at Kansai International Airport for Friday.
Shinkansen bullet-train service was suspended Thursday for all of Kyushu, along with service between Tokyo and Osaka, because of heavy rain. Many of the train lines linking major cities in western Japan, including Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima, were also suspended.
On Wednesday, authorities issued rare emergency warnings for the storm in Kagoshima prefecture, indicating that a large-scale disaster was possible, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. The warnings were downgraded Thursday morning.
Toyota announced that it would pause production at all 14 of its Japan factories starting Wednesday evening. On Thursday morning, the carmaker said that it would extend the suspension until Friday for all but one of the factories.
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