On Friday, hundreds of thousands of residents in Japan were affected by evacuation orders linked to the passage of Tropical Storm Mawar, which caused heavy rains, especially in the center and west of the country.
The eye of the storm, previously classified as a typhoon when it hit the US island of Guam in late May, was in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Japan on Friday.
Evacuation instructions – not mandatory – were issued on Friday to more than 410,000 people in the city of Toyota, in Aichi Prefecture (center).
In the same department, 130,000 residents of Toyohashi have been affected by calls for evacuation accompanied by the maximum level of alert, according to public broadcaster NHK.
In Wakayama Prefecture (west), several streams overflow.
“We urge residents (in affected areas) to exercise extreme caution against risks of landslides, floods and river floods,” government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters.
“Very heavy rain with thunderstorms is expected over a large part of Japan, from west to east, over the next three days,” he said.
JR Central Rail said on its website that high-speed train traffic (shinkansen) between Tokyo and Osaka has been halted.
More than 260 flights were canceled Friday in the country, according to NHK’s mid-afternoon finding.
Scientists said global warming increases the risk of heavy rains in Japan, as warmer air masses carry more vapor.
In July 2021, heavy rain triggered a massive mudslide in the seaside resort of Atami (southwest of Tokyo) that left 27 dead.
Large-scale floods in Kyushu (southwest Japan) claimed more than 80 lives in 2020, and two years before that, the archipelago suffered the worst floods in decades, killing more than 200 people in the west of the country.
