Typhoon Goni slams into Japan prompting calls for thousands to evacuate

Tokyo // Typhoon Goni slammed into the Japanese mainland on Tuesday, leaving at least one person missing and more than 70 others injured, as authorities urged more than 600,000 people to leave homes.

The powerful storm, which killed at least 26 people in landslides and floods in the Philippines, hit the southwestern Kumamoto prefecture on Kyushu island at about 6am local time, Japan’s weather agency said.

Most regional railway operators halted trains while several hundred flights arriving and departing from local airports were also cancelled, including international services between Fukuoka and other regional centres including Seoul and Shanghai.

Packing gusts up to 180 kilometres per hour, Goni passed over Kyushu, one of Japan’s four main islands, and continued its path over the Sea of Japan, according to the Japan meteorological agency.

TV footage showed trees ripped from their roots by violent winds and streets strewn with seaweed and fish dumped ashore by huge waves.

Most of those injured sustained minor cuts from broken glass, a prefectural official said.

In the major city of Fukuoka, a man in his 60s suffered a serious head injury after he was hit by a flying steel pipe.

In Kumamoto, a man delivering newspapers was missing and believed buried by a landslide, a Jiji Press report said.

Local governments in northern Kyushu and some prefectures on the main island of Honshu issued evacuation advisories for more than 600,000 people, the disaster management agency reported.

Almost 290,000 households in Kyushu were left without electricity after blackouts on Tuesday afternoon.

At the weekend, Goni hit parts of the northern Philippines hard, destroying nearly 1,000 houses and forcing more than 12,000 people to flee.

* Agence France-Presse