TOKYO (AFP) - The biggest typhoon to hit Japan in more than a decade roared over the country's main island, with heavy rain and fierce winds leaving at least 16 people dead and 12 others missing, officials said.
Typhoon Tokage also injured at least 62 people, police said, after becoming a record 10th major storm to land on the archipelago in the past year. The typhoons have claimed at least 118 lives.
Packing windspeeds of 144 kilometers (89 miles) per hour, Tokage triggered landslides and sent objects flying while bullet trains between Tokyo and Osaka had to be cancelled.
Nearly 900 domestic flights were cancelled, affecting 103,000 passengers, and tens of thousands of homes lost power as it raced northeast over Honshu Island, with Tokyo in its sights overnight.
Tokage, with an 800-kilometer radius, is the biggest typhoon to batter Japan since 1991 when the Meteorological Agency began classifying typhoons by the size of their storm zones.
The typhoon hit land in southwest Japan's Kochi prefecture, where a 20-meter (22-yard) high dike gave way at Muroto due to high waves, destroying several houses.
"At least three bodies were found in the area. There might be more," a local police official said.
Among the other 13 killed, a 31-year-old man was found dead near a flooded river in Miyazaki prefecture after his vehicle skidded at a bridge, police said.
In southwestern Ehime prefecture, a 24-year-old woman died after being buried by a landslide. Also in Ehime, two elderly men and a woman went missing after separate landslides destroyed their houses.
Other people who went missing included a 75-year-old fishermen pulled into the ocean as he inspected his boat in Kochi, a 63-year-old farmer swept away in a ricefield in Miyazaki and a newspaper deliveryman who disappeared in Oita prefecture.
In Chiba prefecture just east of Tokyo, two workers building an embankment along a coastline were pulled into the Pacific by high waves, a government official said.
Among the injured were four people trapped in an office building which was crushed in Oita, a 68-year-old man in Saga Prefecture who fell from his roof while fixing it and an 83-year-old woman who fell and broke her thigh.
With Tokage moving at some 50 kilometers per hour, authorities have issued evacuation warnings to 17,434 people who live mainly in southern Japan.
By Wednesday afternoon, 4,250 people had voluntarily left for temporary shelters, the disaster agency said.
In the southern island of Kyushu 45,300 households lost power, while 29,713 lost electricity in neighboring Shikoku.
The nine previous typhoons that have hit Japan this year caused a total of 102 deaths and left 13 missing and presumed dead.
Typhoon Ma-on slammed into the Tokyo metropolitan area on October 9, killing six people and paralyzing the capital's transport systems.
Just a week before Ma-on, Typhoon Meari wreaked havoc in the Japanese islands, killing 22 and injuring 89 in floods, landslides and other accidents.
