Typhoon Nanmadol made landfall in southwestern Japan on Sunday night, with authorities urging millions of people to take shelter from the powerful storm’s strong winds and torrential rain.
The storm officially made landfall at around 19:00 local time (11:00 BST) when its eyewall, the region just outside the eye, reached near Kagoshima, the Japan Meteorological Agency said (JMA).
It was packing gusts of up to nearly 150mph and had already dumped up to 500mm of rain in less than 24 hours on parts of the southwestern Kyushu region.
Local authorities said several people were injured. In the city of Kushima, in southern Miyazaki Prefecture, a woman was slightly injured by shards of glass when the winds shattered the windows of a gym. National broadcaster NHK reported that 15 people had been injured, citing its own account.
At least 20,000 people spent the night in shelters in Kyushu’s Kagoshima and Miyazaki prefectures, where the JMA has issued a rare “special warning” – an alert that is only issued when it forecasts conditions seen once in several decades .
National broadcaster NHK, which is gathering information from local authorities, said more than 7 million people had been told to move to shelters or take shelter in sturdy buildings to weather the storm.
Evacuation notices are not mandatory, and authorities have sometimes struggled to persuade people to move to shelters ahead of extreme weather. They tried to drive home their concerns about the weather system throughout the weekend.
“Please stay away from dangerous places and evacuate please please at the slightest sign of danger,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida tweeted after calling a government meeting on the storm .
“It will be dangerous to evacuate at night. Please get to safety while it’s still light outside.”
The JMA has warned that the region could face unprecedented danger from strong winds, storm surges and torrential rain and described the storm as “very dangerous”.
“The areas affected by the storm are seeing the kind of rain that has never been experienced before,” Hiro Kato, head of the Weather Monitoring and Warning Center, told reporters on Sunday.
“Especially in areas under landslide warnings, it’s very likely that some types of landslides are already occurring.”
He called for “maximum caution even in areas where disasters do not usually happen”.
As of Sunday evening, utility companies said nearly 200,000 homes across the region were without power. Trains, flights and ferries were canceled until the storm passed, and even some convenience stores – usually open around the clock and considered a lifeline in the event of disasters – closed their doors.
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“The southern part of the Kyushu region may see the kind of violent wind, high waves and high tides that have never been experienced before,” the JMA said on Sunday, urging people to exercise “maximum caution” .
On the ground, an official from Kagoshima’s Izumi city said conditions were deteriorating rapidly by Sunday afternoon.
“The wind has become very strong. The rain is also falling heavily,” he told AFP. “It’s pitch black outside. Visibility is almost zero.”
The storm, which weakened slightly as it neared land, is expected to turn northeast and lash Japan’s main island on Wednesday morning.
Japan is now in typhoon season and faces 20 such storms a year, with heavy rains causing landslides or flash floods. In 2019, Typhoon Hagibis slammed into Japan as it hosted the Rugby World Cup, killing more than 100 people.
A year earlier, Typhoon Jebi closed Osaka’s Kansai Airport and killed 14 people. And in 2018, floods and landslides killed more than 200 people in western Japan during the country’s annual rainy season.
Scientists say the climate crisis is increasing the severity of storms and causing extreme weather such as heat waves, droughts and flash floods to become more frequent and intense.