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Typhoon Hagibis wreaks havoc in Japan, leaves at least 26 dead

Tokyo: Powerful Typhoon Hagibis killed at least 26 people, local media reported Sunday, a day after the ferocious storm slammed into Japan, unleashing unprecedented rain and catastrophic flooding.

More than 100,000 rescuers, including 31,000 troops, were working into the night to reach people trapped after torrential rain caused landslides and filled rivers until they burst their banks.

The destruction forced the Rugby World Cup to cancel a third tournament match, though a key Japan-Scotland fixture was ruled safe to play.

The storm moved off the land on Sunday morning, and while it largely spared the capital, it left a trail of destruction in surrounding regions.

The government put the death toll at 14, with 11 people missing, but local media said at least 26 people had been killed, and at least 15 were still unaccounted for.

Rivers overspilled their banks at nearly a dozen locations, including in central Japan's Nagano, where a levee breach sent water from the Chikuma river gushing into residential neighbourhoods, flooding homes up to the second floor.

Military and fire department helicopters winched survivors from roofs and balconies in several locations. In Iwaki City, Fukushima, a rescue went tragically awry when a woman died after falling while she was being taken to safety.

Elsewhere, rescue workers carried out an hours-long boat operation to evacuate hundreds of people from a retirement home in Kawagoe, northwest of Tokyo, which was flooded up to its top floor.

Hagibis smashed into the main Japanese island of Honshu on Saturday night as one of the most violent typhoons in recent years, with wind gusts of up to 216 kilometres per hour (134 miles per hour). The storm claimed its first victim even before making landfall, when high winds flipped a vehicle, killing its driver.

Landslides and flooding claimed more lives overnight, and the toll climbed higher after sunrise on Sunday, as the scale of the devastation wrought by Hagibis became clear. Bodies were retrieved from submerged homes and vehicles, from raging overflowing rivers, and from buildings buried in landslides.

"The government will do its utmost," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, vowing that rescue efforts would run through the night.

"Please do your best," he told a disaster management meeting.

More than 110,000 homes were still without power by Sunday evening, with others experiencing water outages.

The storm brought travel chaos during a long holiday weekend in Japan, grounding flights and halting local and bullet train services. On Sunday, train services began resuming and operations also slowly restarted at the two airports serving the capital, although many flights were cancelled. But some lines remained halted, with aerial footage in Nagano showing rows of bullet trains partially submerged by flooding.

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