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Southern islands of Japan pounded by Typhoon Manyi

One of the most powerful storms to hit Japan in decades headed away from Tokyo yesterday after leaving four people dead or missing, flooding hundreds of homes and triggering landslides, officials said.

Typhoon Manyi was weakening as it churned in the Pacific Ocean south of the capital, but the national weather agency urged residents to remain on high alert in the coming days, warning that mudslides were still a possibility.

The storm lashed the country's main southern and southwestern islands of Kyushu and Shikoku on Saturday, killing three people, leaving another missing, injuring 73 and inundating more than 700 houses, public broadcaster NHK said.

Television footage yesterday showed an elderly woman fleeing her flooded home in a boat in the northern province of Fukushima while thousands of people were stranded at airports and train stations in the Tokyo area.

The storm -- the worst to hit the archipelagos in July since records began in 1951 -- first made landfall in southern Japan on Friday.

"It is now moving away from the Tokyo region while weakening. But it is still highly possible mudslides and other disasters will occur after downpours in the past few days," said meteorologist Masahiko Doi.

Packing winds of up to 162kph, the typhoon -- named after a strait that is now a reservoir in Hong Kong -- was whipping up waves of more than 9m around the Izu island chain south of Tokyo, Doi said.

"I heard huge noises. I was jolted awake and saw the floors had become bumpy," a woman whose house was half-buried by a landslide told NHK.

An 11-year-old boy and a 76-year-old man drowned in separate incidents in Kyushu's Kagoshima prefecture on Saturday, local officials said.

"You are not safe here ... Many residents are elderly and we want them to evacuate by helping each other," Kagoshima University geologist Ryusuke Imura said while helping clear up after a landslide.

In the southwestern prefecture of Tokushima, a 79-year-old man also drowned.

"He left home to check his rice paddies yesterday. He was found face down in a river some 400m away from where his motorbike was parked," a municipal official said.

One person was missing in central Nagoya.

The weather agency warned that the northern part of the country could get up to 250mm of rainfall in a 24-hour period until this afternoon.
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