Japan quake death toll hits 35 as auto and chip factories suspend productions
Tens of thousands of residents are without power and water in temperatures forecast to approach 40°C this weekend.
Heavy machinery removes debris at Aeon Mall, which was damaged by an explosion following an earthquake, in Kashima, Kumamoto Prefecture, southern Japan, on Jul 31, 2026. (Phoot: AP/Kyodo News)
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KUMAMOTO: Sniffer dogs in Japan helped rescuers Friday (Jul 31) make a final sweep of a shopping mall wrecked by an explosion after a big earthquake, as the death toll from the tremor three days earlier hit 35.
“At the Aeon mall, 11 people were pulled out as of last night, among them seven dead. To make sure that no one else is inside, we are finalising our confirmation with the assistance of professionally trained dogs,” government spokesman Minoru Kihara said.
Local media quoted the operator of the mall, which was evacuated before being ripped apart by the suspected gas blast over an hour after Tuesday’s quake, as saying that all employees were now accounted for.
At the other major disaster site following the 7.1-magnitude jolt, a paper factory, nine bodies have now been recovered and search and rescue operations were terminated, Kihara said.
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Two survivors were also extracted from the site where a smokestack collapsed, he said, putting the overall death toll from the quake in the southwestern region of Kumamoto at 35.
The quake caused widespread damage, flattening homes, damaging bridges, triggering fires and leaving tens of thousands of residents without power and water in temperatures forecast to approach 40°C this weekend.
As of Friday, around 4,500 households across Kumamoto still had no electricity and 79,000 households no water, Kihara said, with some 5,100 military personnel mobilised to help.
Thousands of people, many of them elderly, were escaping the heat in evacuation shelters.
One piece of good news was that 25 felines from a “cat cafe” inside the mall were rescued and transferred to Hiroshima, triggering widespread relief on social media.
FACTORIES GRIND TO A HALT
The earthquake has also brought auto and chip factories to a halt, exposing the vulnerability of Japan’s manufacturing supply chains, a decade after a devastating quake in the same region triggered widespread industry disruption.
Kumamoto is critical to Japan’s auto industry and known as well as the country’s “Silicon Valley” due to its concentration of semiconductor firms.
While economists don’t expect disruption on the scale seen after the 2016 quake, problems could persist for the likes of automakers, where parts shortages can snarl production far and wide.
Toyota, for example, has suspended production at three plants in Fukuoka, north of Kumamoto, through to Aug 5, while even one of its plants in Aichi – more than 600km from the disaster site – will be idled next week.
A Toyota spokesperson said the decision for the suspensions was made in consideration of safety and the situation at distribution companies and suppliers.
Some second- and third-tier suppliers that make parts for the biggest “Tier 1” suppliers appeared to have been affected by the quake as well, one industry executive told Reuters.
Denso, the world’s second-biggest auto parts maker, said one of its suppliers in the area had reported impact from the quake and 13 others were assessing the situation.
Given Japan’s proneness to disasters, manufacturers have for decades sought to strengthen the resilience of parts supply. The latest quake will be a test for how robust their efforts have been.
The world’s largest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, evacuated personnel from its Kumamoto plant immediately after the quake on Tuesday afternoon but a few hours later said it had begun resuming operations.
Others have been slower.
Chipmaker Renesas said it would only be able to resume operations at one of its Kumamoto plants – which had fallen ceiling panels, cracks in walls and some water leaks – in phases from Aug 5.
Japan is one of the world’s most seismically active countries, sitting on top of four major tectonic plates along the western edge of the Pacific “Ring of Fire”.
Kumamoto itself was hit by two devastating earthquakes in 2016, which killed 273 people and injured more than 2,800.
The archipelago, home to around 125 million people, typically experiences hundreds of jolts every year and accounts for about 18 per cent of the world’s earthquakes.
The vast majority are mild, although the damage they cause varies according to their location and the depth below the Earth’s surface at which they strike.
Japan is haunted by the memory of a massive 9.0-magnitude undersea quake in 2011, which triggered a tsunami that killed or left missing around 18,500 people and wrecked the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Source: Agencies/co
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