JAPANESE emergency workers searched tirelessly for survivors at a wrecked shopping mall on Thursday, as the death toll from a major earthquake hit 34 and tens of thousands were left without power in punishing heat.
The Kumamoto disaster management office issued the new tally for Tuesday’s quake, with seven bodies now extracted from the mass of rubble, steel and wires of the Aeon shopping mall after a suspected gas blast.
Five others were in a critical condition after the 7.1-magnitude tremor, while almost 9,500 locals were in evacuation centres in the region of southwestern Japan on the island of Kyushu.
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 hit 38C this weekend.
Some 13,520 households remained without electricity on Thursday.
Hundreds of elderly people, Japan has the world’s second-oldest population — slumbered on thin mats on the hard lobby floor at one community centre in Uki city as they sought relief from the searing sun.
“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.
At home or in the car “it’s too hot and there are too many mosquitoes,” she told AFP.
“In this heat, if you don’t have electricity and air conditioning, it’s very tough,” father-of-four supermarket employee Hiroyuki Matsushima, 53, told AFP.
With no power and running water, Retiree Kenji Ota, 72, has been sleeping inside his car at night.
“This quake was so strong. It was horrible… I can only sleep for two hours or so at night,” he said.
The town of Hikawa was one of the areas worst hit, where many older structures crumpled in the quake and where residents still had no water or power on Thursday.
“The biggest problem is that there is no toilet… I had to go to a nearby school,” said Kinuko Uemura, 85, who told AFP she and her husband were lucky to survive the collapse of their traditional house.
Soshiro Okawa, 59, was at the back of his roadside souvenir shop when the quake struck.
“It was my first time experiencing an earthquake that literally made the ground rise,” he said.
The 59-year-old heard items breaking inside his store while the ground swelled in the parking lot, shattering its asphalt surface and a series of cracks stretched into the foundation of his shop.
The store will suspend operations, but Okawa said that “we need to ensure the livelihood of our growers and job security for my staff”.
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.
A total of 25 felines from a “cat cafe” were however rescued, triggering widespread relief on social media.
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.