Japan orders over 218,000 to evacuate as Chiba rain turns deadly

Torrential rain swamped Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo late Thursday, killing at least one person, knocking out power to more than 10,000 homes and placing over 218,000 residents across three prefectures under evacuation orders.

The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a Level 5 heavy rain emergency warning, the highest tier on its five-level scale, for the Chiba region for the first time on record. The agency first raised the alert for the town of Shirako at 11:40 p.m. local time, then widened it to 18 cities and a town, among them Chiba, Ichihara, Sakura, Yotsukaido, Yachimata, Inzai, Shiroi and Ichikawa.

One person was confirmed dead in Ichikawa City, in Chiba, according to Kyodo News, the first fatality reported from the storm. A woman in her 70s was taken to a hospital but is feared dead after she was found trapped inside a car on a flooded road in Kashiwa, also in Chiba.

A first for Chiba

About 100 millimeters, or 3.9 inches, of rain fell in the hour before 9 p.m. local time, noon GMT, near Sakura City, NHK reported, citing the weather agency. Local forecasters described the rainfall as record or near-record in intensity for the affected areas.

Evacuation orders covered more than 218,000 people in Chiba, Ibaraki and Saitama prefectures as of 10 p.m. local time, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said, and the count kept climbing through the night as the orders spread to new municipalities. The agency's separate tally of households urged to leave topped 100,000, most of them in Chiba.

A parallel Level 5 warning for landslides was issued for the cities of Chiba and Ichihara, on top of the heavy rain alert. Authorities had been alerted to landslides, mudslides and flooded homes in several cities across the region, NHK said, and reports of new damage came in through the night.

The rain knocked out power for more than 10,000 households in Chiba, NHK reported.

Stranded at the station

Suspended train services left hundreds of people stranded at Chiba Station, an AFP journalist at the scene confirmed. Inside the shopping mall at Chiba Metro Station, passengers were photographed resting on the floor, waiting out a shutdown that gave them no way home as service across the prefecture stopped and rail platforms flooded.

This happened all of a sudden so it was a complete surprise. The power is out so I'm worried whether I can open my business in the next couple of days.

Outside Chiba's main metro station, commuters were left waiting for taxis on Thursday as the rail shutdown spread and no restart time was announced. The suspension turned a weather emergency into a transport crisis, cutting the usual routes home for evacuees and workers alike and adding a logistical breakdown to the flooding itself across the wider Chiba area.

The weather agency urged residents in the warned areas to avoid unnecessary travel and to follow the instructions of local municipal authorities as conditions changed overnight. Those unable to evacuate safely were told to move to upper floors or away from rivers and steep slopes, guidance the agency repeated as the alerts spread to new towns.

What forecasters said

Takuya Hosomi, who heads the agency's weather forecast division, told a news conference in Tokyo that it was highly likely some sort of disaster was already occurring. The top-tier warning is normally reserved for conditions the agency judges likely to produce a disaster, and it is issued only when the threat to life is judged to be immediate.

This is shaping up to be an unprecedented level of heavy rain.

It was the first time on record that the agency had issued its top emergency warning for the Chiba region. The alert covered more than a dozen cities at once, and forecasters said the rainfall amounted to a level the area had not seen before, the reason the agency reached for a warning it had never used there.

As of early Friday, officials had not said how long the Level 5 warning would stay in force, nor had they given total rainfall figures for the hardest-hit municipalities.

Across the wider region

The emergency reached beyond Chiba into neighboring Ibaraki and Saitama, where evacuation orders also went out. Footage broadcast by NHK showed cars submerged in floodwaters in a residential district of Kashiwa, and further south in Tateyama, drivers were photographed pushing through heavy rain on roads that had turned to standing water.

Chiba lies along Tokyo Bay and the Pacific coast, directly east of the capital. Scientists have said that human-driven climate change continues to make extreme weather more frequent and more intense across Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific region.

The prefecture was the site of Japan's deadliest flooding in recent memory in October 2019, when torrential rain after a series of typhoons killed at least nine people there. Mudslides crushed homes in the Midori district of Chiba city, and drivers drowned after their vehicles were submerged in the towns of Nagara and Chonan. About 4,700 homes lost running water in the aftermath.

What is known so far

The confirmed toll stood at one death, reported by Kyodo News, with a second person feared dead as of the 10 p.m. accounting. An earlier report from HNGN had said at least two people were in critical condition. The figures were gathered at different points as the storm moved through, and no consolidated casualty count had been released.

The roughly 10,000 households without power and the hundreds still stuck at the station shared one question, when service and electricity would return, and officials had not said.

A warning to residents

The heaviest rain was localized, concentrated on particular areas rather than spread evenly across the prefecture, and the agency's warnings widened through the night as the totals mounted. An official put the risk in plain terms at the Tokyo news conference, pressing anyone in the affected zones to act at once.

lives may be in imminent danger. Please secure your safety immediately.

Neither the weather agency nor local authorities had given an all-clear by early Friday. Evacuation orders were still being added across Chiba, Ibaraki and Saitama, the count rising past the 218,000 recorded at 10 p.m., and forecasters had not said whether the rain would ease during the day or drive totals higher.

For households left in the dark and the Ichikawa business owner unsure when she could reopen, the disruption was already measured in lost days, and the full economic toll was not yet clear.

The pairing of two top-level warnings at once, one for heavy rain across the cities and one for landslides in Chiba and Ichihara, was itself unusual for eastern Japan and marked how severe the night had become across the prefecture.

What comes next

With the Level 5 warning still in force early Friday and no timetable for lifting it, the full extent of the flooding was expected to become clearer during daylight, once the rain eased and crews could reach the streets and homes cut off overnight.