Tokyo - A rapidly weakening typhoon Lan
made landfall in Japan on Monday, setting off landslides and
flooding that prompted evacuation orders for tens of thousands
of people, but then headed out to sea after largely sparing the
capital, Tokyo.
Four people were reported killed, hundreds of plane flights
cancelled, and train services disrupted in the wake of Lan,
which had maintained intense strength until virtually the time
it made landfall west of Tokyo in the early hours of Monday.
At least four people were killed, including a man who was
hit by falling scaffolding, a fisherman tending to his boat, and
a young woman whose car had been washed away by floodwaters.
Another casualty was left comatose by injuries and a man was
missing, NHK public television said. Around 130 others suffered
minor injuries.
Rivers burst their banks in several parts of Japan and
fishing boats were tossed up on land. A container ship was
stranded after being swept onto a harbour wall but all 19 crew
members escaped injury.
Some 80,000 people in Koriyama, a city 200 km (124 miles)
north of Tokyo, were ordered to evacuate as a river neared the
top of its banks, NHK said, but by afternoon water levels were
starting to fall. Several hundred houses in western Japan were
flooded.
"My grandchild lives over there. The house is fine, but the
area is flooded, and they can't get out," one man told NHK.
Lan had weakened to a category 2 storm when it made landfall
early on Monday, sideswiping Tokyo, after powering north for
days as an intense category 4 storm, according to the Tropical
Storm Risk monitoring site.
Lan is the Marshall islands word for "storm".
By Monday afternoon the storm had been downgraded to a
tropical depression and it was in the Pacific, east of the
northernmost main island of Hokkaido, the Japan Meteorological
Agency said.
Around 350 flights were cancelled and train services
disrupted over a wide area of Japan, although most commuter
trains were running smoothly in Tokyo.
Toyota Motor Corp cancelled the first shift at all
of its assembly plants but said it would operate the second
shift as normal.