Death toll from Japan earthquake rises to 28 as rescue efforts continue

Two days after the ground split open beneath Kumamoto, the death toll had climbed to 28. Rescue workers in orange overalls and white helmets were still picking through the wreckage of the Aeon shopping mall in Kashima, a southwestern city that had been shaken by a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on Tuesday. The government spokesman Minoru Kihara delivered the revised count to reporters on Thursday morning, acknowledging that some of those deaths were still being formally investigated for their connection to the quake. The number would likely rise as the search continued.

The tremor had struck with enough force to flatten homes across the island of Kyushu, snap bridges, and ignite fires that spread through neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of residents woke to find themselves without power or running water. The mall itself had been evacuated immediately after the initial shaking, but about fifty minutes later, a massive blast tore through the structure, gutting it entirely. An unknown number of employees were still inside when it happened. Fumihiko Matsuura, a 56-year-old businessman, had been at that same mall just a week earlier to watch a movie. "I was here. I was just here," he told a reporter, the weight of near-miss settling into his words. "It's like I narrowly escaped the danger."

The destruction extended beyond the shopping center. At a Nippon Paper Industries factory in nearby Yatsushiro city, a red-and-white smokestack had partially collapsed, killing five workers and leaving four others unaccounted for. Across the region, the infrastructure that people depended on had fractured. By Thursday morning, more than 22,600 households and facilities still had no electricity. About 84,000 homes were without water as of Wednesday. Television footage captured long lines of people waiting to fill containers with drinking water and fuel for their cars.

The earthquake itself had been measured differently by different agencies. Japan's seismic monitoring system recorded it as 7.1 magnitude, while the U.S. Geological Survey put it at 6.8. The difference was technical, but the damage was unmistakable. What made the situation worse was the relentless string of aftershocks that continued to rattle the region in the days after the main quake. Rescue workers labored through stifling heat, with temperatures forecast to reach at least 35 degrees Celsius, and health authorities had issued a heatstroke warning.

Kumamoto had endured this before. In 2016, two devastating earthquakes had struck the same region, killing 273 people and injuring more than 2,800. That memory hung over the current crisis, a reminder that this part of Japan sat in one of the world's most seismically active zones. The country as a whole experiences hundreds of earthquakes every year—it accounts for roughly 18 percent of all seismic activity on Earth—because it sits atop four major tectonic plates along the western edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Most tremors are mild, but their impact depends entirely on where they strike and how deep beneath the surface they originate.

Japan carries another, darker memory as well. In 2011, a 9.0-magnitude undersea earthquake had triggered a tsunami that killed or left missing around 18,500 people and destroyed the Fukushima nuclear plant. That catastrophe had reshaped how the nation thought about natural disaster. Now, as rescue workers continued their search through the Aeon mall's twisted steel and fallen concrete, as families waited for word of missing relatives, and as the region sweltered through another day of aftershocks, Japan was being reminded once again of its precarious place on the planet's most volatile ground.