Japanese death toll rises as typhoon moves

TOKYO: Typhoon Etau moved away from the Japanese coast yesterday after battering the country to leave eight people dead and eight missing.

The tail end of the storm drenched the northernmost island of Hokkaido with rain, causing extensive damage to homes and transport networks.

One Hokkaido woman died after a bridge collapsed, tipping her car into a swollen river, local police said.

Two men, swept away by floods while trying to clear up after a landslide on the southern island of Shikoku, were found dead yesterday.

Powerful winds blew a man to his death in a river in Osaka on Saturday and two elderly men and a woman were killed on Friday.

A woman was found dead yesterday in a car that had plunged into a river near Hokkaido's Obihiro city about 850 kilometres northwest of Tokyo, a Hokkaido prefectural police spokesman said on condition of anonymity. Police were investigating her death.

Three people are missing after their house was swept away by a flood and Hokkaido police said they were searching for three others who had disappeared during the storm.

Two people were also missing after being swept away by floods in other parts of Japan in the past two days.

Etau - rated a typhoon until it was downgraded on Friday to a tropical storm - hit Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido at 6 am yesterday.

It weakened further and was classified as a tropical depression as it moved off into the Pacific Ocean at more than 70 kilometres per hour, the Meteorological Agency said.

Etau means "storm cloud" in the language of the Pacific island of Palau.

The four-day storm dumped up to 400 millimetres of rain on parts of Hokkaido. Winds reached 144 kilometres per hour during the week, but they had slowed to less than half that speed by yesterday.

The agency continued to warn of possible landslides on terrain weakened by the heavy rainfall.

Torrential rains had flooded more than 700 homes, prompting evacuations and disrupting transportation.