Typhoon Khanun, a tropical cyclone in the East China Sea that battered southern Japan last week, killing at least two people, engulfed the Japanese island of Kyushu on Wednesday, prompting warnings and evacuation orders there and in South Korea, which was next in its path.
On Wednesday, the storm was about 60 miles off the coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, Japan’s meteorological agency said. More than a hundred flights to and from the island and parts of a high-speed railway network were suspended. About 18,000 households lost power.
Japanese meteorologists said that Khanun was advancing north-northwest at about nine miles per hour Wednesday afternoon. Because of its relatively slow pace, rain clouds have lingered, resulting in substantial precipitation. Kyushu was expected to record about 12 inches of rain throughout Wednesday, forecasters said.
The typhoon’s eye was expected to brush past the city of Nagasaki, Japan, and South Korea’s Jeju Island overnight before hitting the country’s southern coast on Thursday morning, according to Korean forecasters. As the typhoon barreled toward Seoul, about 300 flights scheduled to arrive in or depart from South Korea had been canceled on Wednesday, according to FlightAware, which tracks cancellations and delays.
Last week in Japan, in addition to the fatalities, nearly 100 people were injured and thousands lost power after Khanun struck Okinawa, the country’s southernmost prefecture, which lies 350 miles south of Kyushu. At the time, the storm was moving northwest toward China, but over the weekend it pivoted east toward Japan’s southern islands. On Tuesday, it doglegged north toward Kyushu and South Korea.
Both countries began bracing for the storm, issuing landslide and flood warnings and evacuation orders. In South Korea, tens of thousands of teenagers who had gathered for the 25th World Scout Jamboree, and who had already been dealing with a brutal heat wave, began leaving their campsite.
Khanun had maximum sustained winds of 63 m.p.h. in Japan on Wednesday afternoon, the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii said. On the five-category wind scale that U.S. meteorologists use to measure hurricanes, the cyclone would be categorized as a tropical storm. Khanun’s winds were expected to grow slightly stronger and peak Wednesday night at about 70 m.p.h.
The name Khanun, which means jackfruit, was contributed to the Typhoon Committee by Thailand.
A tropical cyclone is a storm that begins over a tropical ocean and generates violent winds, torrential rain and high waves. The term hurricane is used for storms that form around the Americas, while those that develop around Asia are called typhoons.
An earlier typhoon, Doksuri, made landfall in southern China last week with the force of a Category 2 hurricane, then moved north to Beijing, where it killed at least 33 people.
Japan and South Korea have already been battered by an unusually harsh monsoon season this summer. Last month, at least 47 people died in South Korea in nearly a month of some of the heaviest monsoon rains in years; fourteen of them were caught in a flooded highway underpass. In Japan, at least six people died in Kyushu after the island was hit by what officials called “the heaviest rain ever experienced” in the region.
Hikari Hida contributed reporting from Tokyo and Jenny Gross contributed reporting from London.
