Aasaraly the coast of southern Japan 台风
One dead, 60 injured as typhoon sideswipes Japan
Typhoon Ma-On swerved away from Japan’s Pacific coast Wednesday, leaving one person dead and dozens of others injured and damaging a centuries-old castle in Kyoto, officials and reports said.
The storm system, packing winds of up to 108 kilometers per hour, was located 140 kilometers offshore late Wednesday, slowly heading east and further from Honshu.
The Japan Meteorogical Agency said Ma-On was still expected to bring downpours overnight in the country’s eastern and northern regions including coastal areas hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which sparked a crisis at a nuclear power plant in the area.
The drowned body of an 84-year-old man was found on the bank of a river in Kochi Prefecture after he went missing on Tuesday while checking his boat, local police said.
The eye of Ma-On, which spanned 1,600 kilometers, made landfall on Shikoku late Tuesday, bringing up to 120 centimeters of rain since Sunday, the weather agency said.
It also sideswiped a peninsula south of Osaka later as it moved at 15 kilometers per hour.
A total of 60 people were injured in 18 of the country’s 47 prefectures and more than 100 flights were cancelled, the public broadcaster NHK reported.
In the ancient capital of Kyoto, a treasured white plastered wall at the 385-year-old Nijo Castle peeled off after it was exposed to rain and wind from the typhoon, the city office said.
The castle is designated by the U.N. agency UNESCO as one of World Heritage sites.
The weather agency warned that the tsunami-hit northeast coastal area would see rainfall of up to 50 millimeters per hour overnight, urging the region to brace for possible landslides and floods.