‘The shaking was terrifying’: stories of survival and loss emerge after Japan earthquake

Rescuers pulling people from the wreckage in southern Japan in a haunting repeat of disaster that struck 10 years ago ‘Race against time’: Japan earthquake death toll rises as rescue teams search for missing “T here was a voice coming from the collapsed house, and I could see a hand,” Tomohide Nagata, a volunteer firefighter, told the Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun. “One of our senior members crawled in and pulled him out. He was bleeding from the head, but I’m so glad he survived.” Nagata had heard a noise coming from one completely flattened home in the rural town of Hikawa, close to the epicentre of Tuesday’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in southern Japan. The town was one of the areas hardest hit, with numerous older houses collapsing.

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Scoop News DeskKumamoto, Japan · Published Wednesday, July 29, 2026 at 2:52 PM UTCUpdated Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 11:07 AM UTC

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We will go all out to find and rescue as many people as we can.” Iwaoka Shigemi, 79, and his wife, Michiyo, 77, had escaped from their house and spent the night sleeping in their car in Hikawa, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. 1 dead — and hundreds injured when A woman in her 40s had managed to get to an evacuation shelter with three generations of her family after putting herself between falling furniture and her children. “I was pinned under a chest of drawers at home.

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