Six people are dead. Six more haven't been found. That's where things stood by Tuesday afternoon, after Typhoon Dujuan spent two days grinding along Japan's Pacific coast and dropping more rain on the Kanto region than most of it has seen in years.
It moved fast, this update. Early Tuesday morning, officials were still saying four deaths. By the afternoon it was six. That's how these things go when landslides are involved - you don't always know what's under the mud until someone digs it out
Five of the six deaths happened in Chiba, the prefecture just east of Tokyo. A 51-year-old man died doing road restoration work, of all things—out there trying to fix damage from an earlier storm when this one caught up with him. Two women were also killed there, one in her 70s in Kamogawa and another in her 80s in Sanmu, both when landslides took out their homes.
Ages of the dead ranged from the 50s up into the 80s. At least 22 people were hurt.
Kanagawa, just south of the capital, had one confirmed death—a 64-year-old woman in Yokosuka, buried when mud came through her house. Not far from her, an elderly couple is still missing after a second landslide hit nearby.
Rescue crews are also combing through Miura looking for two women who never turned up. Yokosuka and Miura both got hit by a string of landslides in fairly quick succession, which is part of why the search there has dragged into a second day now.
Here's the thing about Chiba—this isn't even its first storm this season.
It took heavy rain in August. Then again in early September. So by the time Dujuan showed up, the ground there was already soaked through and barely holding together. More than 460 houses in the prefecture have damage.
At the peak, something like 58,000 households lost power. And somewhere in Edogawa Ward, the rain gauge clocked 282.5 millimeters in just 24 hours. For context, that's close to what some areas normally see in a whole month.
Japan's weather agency doesn't hand out Level 5 landslide warnings casually. It issued one anyway, for the Izu Islands, Oshima included. Across multiple regions, evacuation advisories or outright orders went out to more than 1.9 million people. Officials kept repeating the same warning through the day: even once the rain lets up, the ground can still give way without much notice.
Tokyo didn't dodge this one either. In Naka-Meguro, a retaining wall along a narrow residential street just came apart - concrete, rock, debris, all of it spilling into the road. Police taped off the block while crews sorted through what was left.
Bad timing too. This hit right in the middle of Silver Week, when a lot of families had travel plans. Instead a good chunk of them ended up evacuated, or just stuck, watching flights get cancelled one after another.
Narita saw serious disruption. Hundreds of flights across eastern Japan got cancelled outright, and a number of travelers headed to Hawaii found themselves stranded for hours. One pilot apparently managed what local reports are calling a "miracle" landing right as the storm closed in - no further details on how close it actually got, but the phrase alone tells you something.
Two big events got caught in it as well. Tokyo Game Show 2026 shut down a full day early so organizers could clear people out before conditions worsened. Meanwhile, over at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, the equestrian competition got cut short and postponed, scrambling the schedule for several national teams - Singapore and India among them, both having to reroute athletes around the storm.
As of Tuesday evening, rescue operations were still going in Chiba and Kanagawa. Police, firefighters, military - all out working through the wreckage, trying to reach the six people still unaccounted for before things get worse again. Nobody's ruling out more landslides this week. The ground's still too wet for that.
Dujuan itself has started pulling away from the coast now. But Japan isn't through with this one yet - recovery crews expect to be at it for days, and some evacuation advisories are staying in place until officials are confident the hillsides will actually hold.
Typhoon Dujuan tore through eastern Japan on September 21 and 22, 2026, triggering deadly landslides and flooding across Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures.
Six people are confirmed dead and six remain missing, with Chiba hit hardest after already taking heavy rain twice in the preceding weeks.
Close to two million people were urged to evacuate, hundreds of flights were grounded, and the storm disrupted both the Tokyo Game Show 2026 and the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya.
Search and rescue work continues as authorities warn saturated ground could still trigger further landslides.
