Tokyo:

Japan braced Wednesday for its strongest typhoon of the year, with authorities advising tens of thousands of people to evacuate and issuing the highest warning level for wind and storm surges on the main southern island of Kyushu.

“Typhoon Shanshan is expected to approach southern Kyushu with extremely strong force through Thursday and it may make landfall,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters.

“It is expected that violent winds, high waves, and storm surge at levels that many people have never experienced before may occur,” said Hayashi, the top government spokesman.

The approach of the storm, packing gusts of up to 252 kilometres (157 miles) per hour and already bringing widespread heavy rain, prompted auto giant Toyota to suspend production at all 14 of its factories.

Two people remained unaccounted for on Wednesday after a landslide buried a house with five family members inside in Gamagori, a city in central Aichi prefecture.

Rescuers worked around the clock and on Wednesday afternoon they pulled out a woman in her 70s.

“She wasn’t breathing and was unconscious,” a Gamagori official told AFP. They were still searching for a man in his 70s and another in his 30s.

For southern Kyushu, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) predicted 1,100 millimetres (43 inches) of precipitation in the 48 hours to Friday morning, around half the annual average for the area comprising Kagoshima and Miyazaki regions.

The JMA also issued its highest “special warning” for violent storms, waves and high tides in parts of the Kagoshima region of Kyushu, with authorities there advising 56,000 people to evacuate.

Video on public broadcaster NHK TV showed roof tiles being blown off houses, broken windows and felled trees.

“Our carport roof was blown away in its entirety. I wasn’t at home when it happened, but my kids say they felt the shaking so strong they thought an earthquake happened,” a local resident in Miyazaki told NHK.

“I was surprised. It was completely beyond our imagination,” she said.

The warnings indicate the “possibility that a major disaster prompted by (the typhoon) is extremely high,” Satoshi Sugimoto, chief forecaster of JMA, told a news conference.

Japan Airlines cancelled 172 domestic flights and six international flights scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, while ANA nixed 219 domestic flights and four international ones on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

The cancellations affected around 25,000 people.

Kyushu Railway said it would suspend some Shinkansen bullet train services between Kumamoto and Kagoshima Chuo from Wednesday night and warned of further possible disruption.

Trains between Tokyo and Fukuoka, the most populous city in Kyushu, may also be cancelled depending on weather conditions this week, other operators said.

Shanshan comes in the wake of Typhoon Ampil, which disrupted hundreds of flights and trains this month.

Despite dumping heavy rain, it caused only minor injuries and damage.

Ampil came days after Tropical Storm Maria brought record rains to northern areas.

Typhoons in the region have been forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change, according to a study released last month.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tokyo:

Japan was set on Thursday to lift a week-old warning that a “megaquake” potentially causing colossal damage and loss of life could strike, the government said.

The alert that such a catastrophe might hit the archipelago of 125 million people prompted thousands of Japanese to cancel holidays and stock up on essentials, emptying shelves in some stores.

Japan’s disaster management minister Yoshifumi Matsumura said the “special call for attention” would be lifted at 5:00 pm (0800 GMT) assuming there was no major seismic activity.

Matsumura cautioned, however, that the “possibility of a major earthquake has not been eliminated”, urging people to regularly check their preparedness “for the major earthquake that is expected”.

Higher than normal 

Last Thursday, Japan’s weather agency said the likelihood of a megaquake was “higher than normal” after a magnitude 7.1 jolt earlier in the day that injured 15 people.

That was a particular kind of tremor known as a subduction megathrust quake, which in the past has occurred in pairs and can unleash massive tsunamis.

The advisory concerned the Nankai Trough between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean.

The 800-kilometre (500-mile) undersea gully runs parallel to Japan’s Pacific coast, including off the Tokyo region, the world’s biggest urban area and home to around 40 million people.

In 1707, all segments of the Nankai Trough ruptured at once, unleashing an earthquake that remains the nation’s second-most powerful on record.

That quake — which also triggered the last eruption of Mount Fuji — was followed by two powerful Nankai megathrusts in 1854, and one each in 1944 and 1946.

Slower trains 

Japan’s government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 per cent probability of striking within the next 30 years.

In the worst-case scenario, 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach $13 trillion, with infrastructure wiped out.

Experts, however, said the risk was still low, and the agriculture and fisheries ministry urged people on Saturday “to refrain from excessively hoarding goods”.

The statement came after supermarkets put limits on purchases including bottled water, and as demand for emergency items such as portable toilets and preserved food soared online.

The megaquake warning even prompted Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to cancel a four-day trip to Central Asia due to take place last weekend.

Some bullet trains reduced their speed as a precaution and nuclear plants were instructed by authorities to double-check their disaster preparations.

‘Convincingly scary’ 

Sitting on top of four major tectonic plates, Japan sees some 1,500 quakes every year, most of them minor.

Even with larger tremors, the impact is generally contained thanks to advanced building techniques and well-practised emergency procedures.

The Japan Meteorological Association (JMA) warning was the first under new rules drawn up after a 2011 quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that left around 18,500 people dead or missing.

The 2011 tsunami sent three reactors into meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing Japan’s worst post-war catastrophe and the world’s most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

“The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary,” geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A. Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter last week.

But there was only a “small probability” that last week’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake was a foreshock, according to Bradley and Hubbard.

“One of the challenges is that even when the risk of a second earthquake is elevated, it is still always low,” they said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)