Flood-Ravaged Japan Braces for Typhoon

Typhoon Robyn, packing gusts of up to 160 m.p.h., roared toward southern Japan on Sunday, bringing more rain to a country already hit hard by floods.

The typhoon was expected to pass just east of Okinawa late Sunday or early today, said Lt. Greg Salvato of the U.S. military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center on Guam. The island is about 1,000 miles south of Tokyo.

Robyn is the seventh Pacific typhoon of the year. It was expected to unleash more rain on southern Japan, where floods and landslides have killed at least 44 people.

Twenty-two people suffered injuries in earlier downpours that triggered floods and landslides across Kagoshima prefecture on Japan’s main southern island of Kyushu.

Prime Minister-elect Morihiro Hosokawa, a native of Kyushu, planned to send a fact-finding team to assess the scale of the damage in Kagoshima after forming his new Cabinet today, news reports said.

Meanwhile, an earthquake measuring a preliminary magnitude of 6.5 rocked northern Japan on Sunday, sending residents of an island already devastated by a quake July 12 fleeing for the safety of high ground.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage from the quake, which was felt most strongly on Okushiri, a remote island where 200 people were killed by an earthquake, fires and 100-foot tidal waves last month.