Typhoon Haishen: four missing in Japan as storm pounds South Korea | Japan

Four people are missing and dozens more have been injured after a powerful typhoon battered south-western Japan on Monday before making landfall on the Korean peninsula.

Typhoon Haishen left 440,000 homes without power and damaged buildings on and near the island of Kyushu.

Authorities had ordered 1.8 million people to evacuate the region, which was still recovering from heavy rains and flooding in July that killed 83 people. Another 5.6 million were told to take precautions.

Japanese media said more than 50 people had been injured, including a woman who fell down a flight of stairs in the dark and four people who sustained cuts after the glass windows of an evacuation centre were blown in.

At one point the typhoon was generating winds of up to 200km an hour [135 mph], raising fears that it could cause widespread damage to homes and other buildings.

Japan appeared to have escaped serious damage, but four people were missing after torrential rain triggered a landslide in a village in southern Kyushu.

Rescue workers were searching through mud and debris after a hillside collapsed, with police officer expected to join the search, the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, told reporters.

Kyodo news agency said a woman in her 60s and her son in his 30s, as well as two Vietnamese men working as interns in the village, had been reported missing.

At least two other deaths had been reported during the storm, Suga added, although the causes were not immediately known.

Airlines cancelled more than 500 flights departing from Okinawa and southern Japan, public broadcaster NHK said. Bullet train services in southern and western Japan were suspended, it said.

Warnings that the storm could be one of the most destructive on record prompted many people to spend the night at evacuation centres and hotels on Kyushu and the southern island of Okinawa.

Some shelters had to reduce the number of people they could accommodate due to anti-coronavirus measures, while hotels were packed with people fearful of catching the virus in overcrowded evacuation centres.

“I had to hurry because I was told that the evacuation centre would only accept 10 more people,” Kazuko Hamada, 67, a Kyushu resident, told Kyodo. “I hope my house is all right.”

Haishen had lost some of its destructive power by the time it reached South Korea, but winds of up to 126kph and heavy rain forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights, cut power to thousands of homes and triggered landslides.

Typhoon Haishen comes just days after Typhoon Maysak left at least two people dead and thousands without power on the Korean peninsula.

After moving up the east coast of the peninsula. Haishen was forecast to make landfall again in the North Korean port city of Chongjin at around midnight, according to South Korea’s meteorological administration.

North Korea is still reeling from the effects of Typhoon Maysak, and there is concern that another powerful storm could cause widespread destruction to agricultural land and threaten an already fragile food supply.

At the weekend, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, toured coastal areas hit by Maysak and ordered party members to join the recovery effort.

Haishen also forced the Japanese coast guard to suspend its search for dozens of missing crew members from the Gulf Livestock 1 cargo ship, which capsized off south-western Japan last week.