A powerful typhoon that battered Tokyo overnight with ferocious winds killed one person, police said yesterday, as halted trains caused commuter chaos and more than 100 flights were canceled.
Typhoon Faxai, packing record winds of up to 207kph, made landfall in Chiba just east of the capital before dawn, after barrelling through Tokyo Bay.
The transport disruptions unleashed by the storm came less than two weeks before the start of the Rugby World Cup and delayed the arrival of the Australia team.
Photo: Kyodo / via Reuters
Police confirmed that one person was killed in the storm, a woman in her 50s who was found dead in Tokyo.
Security camera footage showed that she was pushed across a street and into a wall by high winds, a police spokesman said.
Another woman in her 20s was rescued from her house in Ichihara, east of Tokyo, after it was partly crushed when a perimeter fence from a golf driving range fell on it. She was seriously injured.
“There was a huge grinding noise, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I looked out the window,” a neighbor told NHK.
More than 30 people were injured in the storm, the Kyodo news agency said, while authorities said that more than 2,000 people had taken refuge in shelters.
The strong winds downed trees and power lines, which left 910,000 people without electricity in the Tokyo area yesterday morning, including the entire city of Kamogawa, NHK said.
“I’ve never seen a situation like this, the whole city without power,” an official told NHK.
At least 10 homes were damaged in Shizuoka, with windows shattered and cars flipped on their sides, local media reported.
Elsewhere, scaffolding was ripped from buildings and protective sheeting hung to keep construction debris off the streets was crumpled and torn by the storm.
While the damage was relatively light given the wind speeds, it was enough to cause chaos in the capital’s notoriously busy morning commute.
The overland East Japan Railway train system was largely halted in the early hours of operation while tracks were checked for fallen trees and other debris.
The storm also caused delays and stoppages on subway lines, leading to massive crowds at some stations in the busy metropolitan area that is home to 36 million people.
The usually congested trains and major stations were even more crowded than usual once services resumed, with trains stopping temporarily and running erratically.
“I can’t go to work now, and I also had to contact my customers,” said Tsubasa Kikuchi, a 23-year-old real-estate worker, who had been waiting at Shimbashi Station for more than two hours. “This is troublesome.”
Trains and shuttle buses running to and from Narita International Airport were halted, with taxis the only options left to those arriving or hoping to fly out. More than 5,000 passengers were stranded at the airport.
By mid-Monday morning, the storm had moved offshore and was headed northeast away from Japan, back into the Pacific.
Additional reporting by Reuters and Bloomberg
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion