Typhoon Shanshan battered vast areas of Japan with heavy rain on Friday, leading to severe flood and landslide warnings far beyond the storm’s central location. The storm disrupted travel services and forced major factories to shut down operations.
In Kyushu, located in southwestern Japan, the storm made landfall on Thursday, and officials warned it could be one of the most powerful typhoons ever to hit the region. In Fukuoka city, the usually bustling streets were eerily quiet, with stores closed and residents taking shelter indoors.
University student Kokoro Osoegawa, 21, was stranded at a rain-soaked shopping mall near the city’s train station, unable to find a way home.
“There are no trains because of the typhoon so my parents are coming to pick me up. I stayed at a friend’s house and then came here. I thought there would be some trains but there are none,” she said. “I’ve never experienced all the trains stopping before.”
Recent storm-related incidents have claimed the lives of at least three people and left 78 others injured, according to the disaster management agency.
The typhoon, packing powerful gusts of up to 180 kilometers per hour (112 mph), was positioned near the coastal city of Kunisaki in Oita Prefecture as of 8:45 a.m. on Friday (2345 GMT) and was heading northeast.
More than 125,000 homes across seven prefectures were left without electricity, according to Kyushu Electric Power Co. However, the storm’s slow movement across Japan has caused widespread rainfall in areas far from the typhoon’s center, which authorities find especially concerning.
Evacuation notices were issued to over 4 million people, primarily in Kyushu but also extending as far as Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. Officials in Yokohama warned that some areas faced the risk of landslides due to heavy rains. However, only around 30,000 people had evacuated by Thursday, mostly in Kyushu, as reported by disaster management minister Yoshifumi Matsumura.
The storm was expected to move from Kyushu towards Japan’s central and eastern regions, including Tokyo, over the weekend, according to the weather agency.
The impact on travel was widespread. Airlines like ANA Holdings and Japan Airlines canceled hundreds of domestic and some international flights. Ferry and rail services, including the bullet train between Tokyo and Nagoya, were suspended on Friday morning.
Lin Yue-Hua, a 60-year-old tourist from Taiwan, faced delays after her Thursday flight from Fukuoka was canceled. She described the confusion and uncertainty as she tried to find a way back home.
“We were very worried and upset because we didn’t know what to do,” she explained. “We stayed one more day in Japan. Then we saw it in the news that our flight from Taiwan couldn’t land in Japan after flying around the area for about 40 minutes and it flew back to Taiwan. So we have been busy trying to find our way home.”
Typhoon Shanshan is the latest severe weather event to strike Japan, following Typhoon Ampil earlier this month, which also caused blackouts and evacuations across the country.