Four days after a powerful magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Japan’s southwestern main island of Kyushu, local authorities confirmed Friday that the disaster’s death toll has climbed to 34, with an additional fatality still under investigation to confirm its link to the quake.
The temblor, which hit Tuesday, triggered widespread destruction across the Kumamoto region: it caused a secondary explosion at a busy regional shopping mall, collapsed a massive industrial chimney at a paper factory, and leveled hundreds of residential homes. As of Thursday’s official update, more than 80 people have been injured, five of whom are in critical condition.
In the aftermath of the disaster, thousands of local residents remain displaced. Official data shows more than 3,500 households are still without electricity, and over 9,000 people are currently taking refuge in emergency evacuation shelters. With high summer temperatures creating sweltering conditions inside temporary accommodations, disaster response teams have been rushing to install additional power capacity to run air conditioning, and public health officials have raised growing concerns about the spread of heat-related illnesses and other communicable diseases among displaced populations.
On Friday, search and rescue teams continued combing through wreckage across Kumamoto prefecture, with the highest priority placed on the site of the collapsed Aeon Mall in the town of Kashima — one of the hardest-hit locations. When the earthquake struck, the popular shopping complex was packed with an estimated 3,000 shoppers. Mall management quickly evacuated most visitors to an open-air parking lot before an explosion hit a separate section of the building, where a small number of staff had remained to secure operations. The mall’s second floor collapsed during the quake, leaving multiple people trapped.
During a press briefing in Tokyo Friday, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara confirmed that seven people have been confirmed dead at the mall site, while 11 trapped people have been rescued successfully. Authorities have not yet released information on how many people may still remain unaccounted for at the location.
Kihara also added that search operations have wrapped at another major disaster site: the Nippon Paper Industries factory in Yatsushiro, where a 100-meter factory chimney toppled during the quake. At that location, 11 workers were pulled out alive, but nine were confirmed dead in the collapse.