Two days after the ground shook across southwestern Japan, the death toll keeps climbing in the wrong direction. Officials in Kumamoto prefecture said Thursday that at least 30 people have died since a magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck the region on Tuesday afternoon, and rescuers are running out of time to change that number, as the widely cited 72-hour survival threshold for buried survivors closes in.

The quake, centered a few kilometers east of the city of Uto on Japan's southern island of Kyushu, hit with a maximum seismic intensity of 7 — the highest level on Japan's scale, and one the country hadn't seen since the Noto Peninsula earthquake on New Year's Day 2024. A magnitude-5.6 aftershock followed within the hour. At least 63 people were injured, five of them seriously, according to the Kumamoto prefectural government, and the number still missing remains unclear.

Summary

  • Two days after a magnitude-7.1 earthquake toppled a factory chimney, flattened homes, and set off a mall explosion in Kumamoto, rescuers are racing a closing survival window while thousands of evacuees battle a punishing heatwave.
  • Two days after the ground shook across southwestern Japan, the death toll keeps climbing in the wrong direction.
  • Officials in Kumamoto prefecture said Thursday that at least 30 people have died since a magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck the region on Tuesday afternoon, and rescuers are running out of time to change that number, as the widely cited 72-hour survival threshold for buried survivors closes in.

A mall turned death trap

The single deadliest scene was the Aeon Mall in the town of Kashima, which was packed with shoppers when the quake hit in the late afternoon. The company said roughly 3,000 customers were evacuated to the parking lot before an explosion — believed to be gas-related — tore through another part of the building about an hour later, collapsing the mall's second floor onto people still inside. As of early Thursday, six people had died at the mall site among 11 pulled from the debris, officials said.

Elsewhere, the quake toppled a factory chimney and flattened older-style wooden homes that make up much of the region's housing stock — a reminder that even in a country with some of the world's strictest building codes, older residential structures remain far more vulnerable than modern high-rises. The Kyushu Shinkansen high-speed rail line remained suspended, and Kumamoto's city tram network was running at reduced speed as crews checked for structural damage along the routes.

"Every second counts."— Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, on the search for survivors

Racing the heat as much as the clock

Compounding the rescue effort is a heatwave settling over Kyushu just as thousands of displaced residents shelter in evacuation centers. Japan's Ministry of Environment issued a heat-stroke alert for the Kumamoto area, with forecasters warning of temperatures climbing into the mid-to-high 30s Celsius in the coming days — brutal conditions both for rescue crews working through unstable rubble and for elderly evacuees with limited access to reliable cooling. Local authorities have urged both groups to pace themselves and stay hydrated, aware that a slow-moving second crisis, heat illness, could add to a death toll that's already Japan's worst single-quake toll in years.