A magnitude 7.1 earthquake tore through Japan's southern island of Kyushu on Tuesday, and four days later, 34 people are confirmed dead, a shopping mall has exploded, a factory chimney has crushed workers, and nearly 80,000 homes have no running water in 97-degree heat. The number of missing is, officially, unknown. Search teams are still digging.
A Mall, a Chimney, and Nowhere to Run
The earthquake hit Kyushu on Tuesday, and the damage reads like a list someone made up to illustrate what worst-case scenarios look like. The Associated Press reports that at the Aeon Mall shopping complex in the town of Kashima, roughly 3,000 shoppers were evacuated to a parking lot before an explosion ripped through another section of the building where staff were still working. The mall's second floor collapsed on top of people.
As of Friday, seven people were confirmed dead at that site and eleven had been pulled out alive, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara told reporters. How many are still missing? Authorities aren't saying.
At a Nippon Paper Industries factory in the Yatsushiro area, a chimney collapsed during the quake. Rescue operations there have now concluded, according to Kihara. Eleven people were rescued. Nine others were not.
79,000 Homes Without Water. In July. In Japan.
The quake killed 34 people. That's the number they're sure about. One more death is still under investigation. Dozens more were injured. But the disaster unfolding in the days since may end up defining this earthquake as much as the initial strike.
As of Friday, more than 79,000 homes had no water, and more than 3,500 had no electricity, according to the Kumamoto prefectural government as reported by the AP. Over 9,000 people are sheltering in evacuation centers, where officials are scrambling to add power sources just to run air conditioning.
The reason that matters: temperatures in Kumamoto city hit 35 degrees Celsius, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, on Thursday, and were forecast to climb to 36 Celsius, roughly 97 degrees, on Friday, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. No water. No power. Record heat. The conditions for a secondary catastrophe are fully assembled.
The Town of Hikawa Has Lost a Fifth of Its Homes
In Hikawa, described as one of the worst-hit areas in Kumamoto, officials said more than 800 of the town's 4,500 homes were either destroyed or badly damaged, according to AP reporting. That's nearly one in five homes in an entire town, gone or uninhabitable.
Residents there were sleeping in their cars in parking lots and outside their homes, too frightened to go back inside. Among them was Ayako Sudo, a woman in her 70s, who told reporters she was sheltering in her car with her husband. "Since it's a wooden house, the shaking is really intense," she said. "Even when the earthquakes are small, it shakes, and it brings up this feeling of fear."
Sudo, it turns out, did the exact same thing after a powerful earthquake struck Kumamoto in 2016. "It's exhausting," she said. "We've been sleep-deprived in the car." That one sentence carries more weight than any damage assessment.
Bullet Trains Are Running. The People Are Not Fine.
Shinkansen bullet trains have partially resumed between Kumamoto and Fukuoka to the north, according to Kyushu Railway Co., as reported by the AP. Progress. Local trains across quake-hit areas in southern Kumamoto, meanwhile, remain suspended.
Search operations continued Friday at collapsed homes across the region, but authorities have not provided a firm count of how many people are still missing. Four days in, and they still can't give a number. That's not administrative caution. That's an indication of how widespread and chaotic the destruction actually is.
The Dingo Take
Thirty-four people dead, and the number is almost certainly going to climb. A shopping mall exploded. A factory chimney crushed nine workers. Nearly 80,000 homes have no water in the middle of a heat wave that would be dangerous under comfortable circumstances. And Japanese officials are still saying they don't know how many people are missing. Not "it's a small number we're working to confirm." They genuinely do not know.
Japan is, by any measure, one of the best-prepared countries on earth for seismic disasters. They have strict building codes, practiced emergency response systems, and a population that has lived with earthquake risk for centuries. And it still looks like this. A 7.1 magnitude quake doesn't ask about your preparedness. It just hits.
Ayako Sudo sleeping in her car for the second time in a decade, exhausted, afraid to go back into her own home, is the whole story in one image. The infrastructure damage gets repaired. The trauma from lying awake in a parking lot at 97 degrees, listening for aftershocks, because your house shakes so hard you don't trust it anymore? That doesn't go away when the power comes back on.
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