Japan quake toll hits 28 as survivors struggle in heat

Japanese emergency workers battled Thursday to rescue any remaining survivors from a devastated shopping mall, as the death toll from a major earthquake hit 28 and thousands sweltered in punishing heat.

The government issued the new tally as Kumamoto officials said they have now extracted four bodies from the mass of rubble, steel and wires of the Aeon shopping mall after a suspected gas blast following Tuesday's quake.

At the mall, "we have pulled out 10 people. Of them, four were confirmed dead. Another is without vital signs. Another five have suffered severe and minor injuries," an official from the disaster management office in the southwestern region told AFP.

Tuesday's 7.1-magnitude tremor caused widespread damage, flattening homes, damaging bridges, triggering fires and leaving tens of thousands of residents without power and water in temperatures forecast to hit 38C this weekend.

Hundreds of elderly people -- Japan has the world's second-oldest population -- slumbered on thin mats on the hard lobby floor at a community centre in Uki city as they sought relief from the punishing heat.

"Thank God for these shelters," said one woman, who declined to give her name, as people slept between chairs and tables or gathered around a television to watch the news.

She had tried to stay home, or rest in her car, "but it's too hot and there are too many mosquitoes".

"In this heat, if you don't have electricity and air conditioning, it's very tough," chimed in father-of-four supermarket employee Hiroyuki Matsushima, 53.

Narrow escape

The shopping mall was evacuated after the earthquake but around 50 minutes later the facility was gutted by the massive blast with an unknown number of employees still inside.

Businessman Fumihiko Matsuura, 56, said he had watched the latest "Toy Story" movie at the mall only a week or so ago.

"I was here. I was just here," he told AFP. "It's like I narrowly escaped the danger."

Footage from inside showed rescue workers in orange overalls and white helmets picking their way through a mass of twisted steel, dangling cables and chunks of ceiling.

Five people were also confirmed killed and four others were unaccounted for at the Nippon Paper Industries factory in Yatsushiro city, where part of a red-and-white smokestack collapsed, a government official told AFP on Wednesday.

Utilities disrupted

As of Thursday morning, some 22,670 households and facilities still had no power. Around 84,000 homes were suffering water disruptions as of Wednesday.

TV footage showed people queueing for petrol and drinking water. Authorities have sent hundreds of air conditioning units to shelters.

The US Geological Survey measured the quake at 6.8, lower than Japan's reading of 7.1.

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 percent 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.