Rescue teams search for missing after 7.1 quake in Kumamoto, Japan

Soldiers, self-defence forces and emergency workers continued to search a heavily damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses on Wednesday following a magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck the Kumamoto area of Kyushu a day earlier. The quake killed at least 18 people, including a foreign worker, and injured 62, six of them seriously, according to the prefectural government.

The Aeon Mall in Kashima city, which housed thousands of shoppers at the time of the tremor, suffered a second-floor collapse and a gas explosion. Aeon President Akio Yoshida said four deaths were confirmed at the mall and three people remained missing. > "We take it seriously that an explosion happened and precious lives were lost," Yoshida told reporters.

In the nearby town of Yatsushino, a chimney collapse at a Nippon Paper Industries plant killed five workers and left four people possibly trapped. A Vietnamese technical intern was also killed when a crane fell at the same facility, while a Vietnamese woman was injured by a wall collapse.

Nearly 35,000 homes remained without electricity and about 15,000 without running water, prompting more than 8,800 residents to seek shelter in over 400 evacuation centres where generators were being installed. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the government was preparing food and other supplies for the affected areas and expressed condolences to victims' families. > "There are people who are still waiting to be rescued, and it's a race against time," she said.

Japan’s Self-Defence Forces joined the effort, and firefighters from Taiwan also assisted. Bullet-train services stayed suspended, while Aso Kumamoto Airport resumed limited operations.

The disaster follows a 2016 quake in the same region that killed at least 50 people, underscoring Japan’s vulnerability to seismic events.