Tag Archives: Japan

North Korea diplomat expected to attend China forum with U.S. envoy

North Korean flag in Beijing

SEOUL (Reuters) – A North Korean diplomat who was part of the so-called six-party talks aimed at ending the country’s nuclear program arrived on Monday in China, where she is expected to attend a forum in which the U.S. nuclear envoy will take part, Japan’s Kyodo news agency said.

If the diplomat does take part, it would be a rare gathering of experts from the six countries, coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping said he would like to see the six-party talks resume.

Isolated North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month in defiance of U.N. resolutions, prompting the U.N. Security Council to impose new sanctions.

China, reclusive North Korea’s only major ally, has been angered by its nuclear and missile programs. Xi said in April China wanted to see a resumption of the six-party talks, which have been stalled since 2008.

The North Korean diplomat, Choe Son Hui, is deputy director-general of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s U.S. affairs bureau, according to South Korea. She was a delegate to the stop-start six-party nuclear talks, hosted by China.

Choe was expected to attend the closed-door Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue in Beijing, hosted by the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, Kyodo said.

The annual dialogue is an informal multilateral conference attended by government officials and scholars from the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China, the five countries involved in the six-party talks along with North Korea.

“We hope that this conference can make a meaningful inquiry into the relevant cooperation issues in northeast Asia,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters in Beijing.

The U.S. State Department said last week that Sung Kim, the U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, would attend the forum in Beijing. Kyodo said Japan may also send its top nuclear negotiator.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that Kim has no plans to meet with his North Korean counterparts during the session.

It was unclear if Choe would hold separate meetings with officials from other countries.

Choe attended a security conference in 2012 in China, but no representatives from North Korea have taken part since, according to the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

The visit comes after career diplomat Ri Su Yong, one of North Korea’s highest-profile officials, visited China and held a rare meeting with Xi.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park, additional reporting by Megha Rajagopalan in Beijing and Warren Strobel in Washington; Editing by Nick Macfie and Steve Orlofsky)

Yen falls vs dollar for second day to near two-week low

Japanese Yen Notes

By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The yen slid to a nearly two-week low against the dollar on Tuesday as risk appetite improved for a second straight session, undermining traditional safe havens such as the Japanese currency.

Repeated verbal warnings from Japan over the weekend and on Tuesday saying it was prepared to step in to weaken the currency has also held off investors seeking to buy the yen at the expense of the dollar. The greenback has struggled recently as the Federal Reserve is on track to raise U.S. interest rates gradually.

“Risk appetite is naturally tied to the belief that we’re in an ultra-low-yield environment and investment managers can’t simply sit here,” said Jeremy Cook, chief economist at payments company World First in London.

“We have to see a move any time we see the slightest bit of positivity, by grabbing yield in emerging markets currencies, for instance.”

Global stock markets were on the upswing overall led by European and Wall Street shares, adding to the positive risk sentiment. [MKTS/GLOB]

In late morning trading, the dollar rose 0.7 percent to 109.11 yen, after hitting a roughly two-week peak of 109.27 <JPY=>. The U.S. currency tumbled to an 18-month low of 105.55 yen last week after the Bank of Japan stood pat on monetary policy.

Finance Minister Taro Aso said on Monday Tokyo was ready to intervene to weaken the currency if moves were volatile enough to hurt the country’s trade and economy. He reiterated that message on Tuesday.

A key economic adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Koichi Hamada, also said on Tuesday Japan would intervene in currency markets if the yen rose to between 90 and 95 per dollar.

“There’s definitely the possibility of intervention,” said World First’s Cook. “But I don’t think this will turn the market around. It will be more of a stop-gap measure.”

He added that the only thing that could reverse the yen’s recent strength is fiscal and monetary policy action and any change could happen as early as June.

Meanwhile, speculators were cutting favorable bets on the yen, having piled into the currency in the past few weeks. [IMM/FX]

In other currencies, the euro rose 0.8 percent to a near two-week high of 124.38 yen <EURJPY=>, pulling away from a three-year trough of 121.48 plumbed late last week.

The euro was flat against the dollar at $1.1388 <EUR=>. The dollar index <.DXY> was at 94.171, having hit its highest in nearly two weeks earlier and extending its rise from a 15-month trough struck on May 3.

(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York; Additional reporting by Anirban Nag in London; Editing by James Dalgleish)

U.S. Bullet train proposals shun public funds, favor private cash

China Railway High-speed Harmony bullet trains are seen at a high-speed train maintenance base in Wuhan

By Robin Respaut

(Reuters) – It took years of lawsuits and political battles for California to finally break ground last year on the nation’s first bullet train, which aims to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2029.

High-speed rail advocates had hoped the line, supported by more than $13 billion in state and federal money, would inspire similar government-financed projects. Instead, its many delays have left rail groups wary of accepting public funds for projects they are proposing in three other states.

Companies in Texas, Minnesota and Nevada all plan to tap private cash from investors globally, with help from foreign train makers and governments eager to export train technology. The projects would rely on partnerships with Japanese or Chinese firms that face saturated train markets at home.

“The United States is the Holy Grail of deployment for Japan, China, France, Germany and Spain,” said Tim Keith, Texas Central CEO.

California’s example shows that taking taxpayer money opens the door to political and legal challenges that can drag out planning, bidding and approvals for years, private rail advocates said. Companies now see a quicker – even cheaper – path by largely avoiding such headaches.

“All the rules relating to public engagement start the day you take public funding,” said Wendy Meadley, chief strategy officer for North American High Speed Rail Group’s project in Minnesota. With private financing, she said, opponents “can’t make thousands of public records requests and run the project over.”

The company said last year it would seek money from Chinese investors. Now, it said it is considering two foreign partners for the $4.2 billion project, which seeks to connect the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to the internationally renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, by 2022.

Texas Central is paying for engineering studies with $75 million from Texas investors, $40 million from a state-backed Japanese development fund and about $130 million in design work from two firms. The Dallas-to-Houston rail line is projected to cost $12 billion and be completed by 2021.

In Nevada, privately financed XpressWest plans to link Las Vegas to Southern California. Started by Las Vegas developer Marnell Companies, the company formed a joint venture last fall with a consortium of Chinese firms, infusing $100 million into the project expected to break ground as soon as this year.

XpressWest officials declined to comment.

GOVERNMENT JUMPSTART

Some experts remain skeptical that bullet trains can work without government money to finance initial legs of construction.

Rail lines are generally profitable once in operation, said Jim Steer, director of UK-based high-speed rail research organization Greengauge 21. But operating profits are unlikely to be enough to repay massive construction costs.

“No private party is actually going to stump up the kind of money needed to create these things,” said Steer.

Supporters of the new rail lines said investors can expect solid returns based on ticket sales and profits from high-end real estate developments near stations.

Current economic trends also make private financing for infrastructure projects easier to secure. Interest rates at historic lows have created global demand for stable, long-term investments, igniting interest in infrastructure projects from banks and major investors, such as pension funds.

The number of institutional investors in infrastructure, such as roads, airports and rail, more than doubled since 2011, according to Preqin, an alternative investments research firm.

“There’s a lot of money swimming around the world that doesn’t know where to go,” said Dr. Alexander Metcalf, president of TEMS, Inc., a transportation consulting firm. “We’ve seen huge increases in institutional money that is willing to go into transportation.”

Longstanding U.S. skepticism of expensive train projects does not necessarily extend to foreign investors, Meadley said.

“People outside of this country believe this will happen more than Americans believe this will happen,” she said.

POLITICAL PERILS

The U.S. is decades behind Europe and Asia in building fast trains.

In the early 1990s, French and German companies made plays to construct a high-speed network across Texas. But the project relied in part on taxpayer money, and the proposal collapsed when local political support waned.

Texas train officials now see private financing as the faster, cheaper – and only – avenue. If their project relied on public subsidies, “we’d end up pulling the plug,” said Robert Eckels, a director at Texas Central.

Project officials say they have avoided U.S. federal funding in part because it includes a requirement that American workers manufacture the trains – even though no such U.S. factory currently exists.

Since 2009, the government has spent $10 billion to improve passenger rail service in the U.S. California was the only recipient constructing a high-speed rail line, and the money will only go so far. The state will likely need private money to finance much of the project’s estimated $64 million cost.

State rail officials overseeing the California project, considered the most ambitious planned in the U.S. and the farthest along, say there’s growing interest from foreign governments and international firms to finance the second leg to Los Angeles.

In February, the state announced the opening of the train’s first leg, a 250-mile line from the rural Central Valley to Silicon Valley, would be pushed back by three years to 2025.

The progress has been measured in decades rather than years. California Governor Jerry Brown first signed legislation to study high-speed rail during a previous tenure in office – in 1982.

“Everything big runs into opposition,” Brown said at the rail line’s groundbreaking in January 2015.

(Additional reporting by Brenda Goh in Shanghai and Tim Kelly in Tokyo; Editing by Brian Thevenot)

World ‘greatly worried’ on China’s maritime expansion, says Japan

Still image from United States Navy video purportedly shows Chinese dredging vessels in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, speaking ahead of a visit to Beijing, said on Monday China was making the world “worried” with its military buildup and maritime expansion in the East and South China Seas.

Ties between China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-largest economies, have long been plagued by a territorial dispute, regional rivalry and the legacy of Japan’s World War Two aggression.

China and Japan dispute sovereignty over a group of uninhabited East China Sea islets, while in the South China Sea, Beijing is building islands on reefs to bolster its claims.

China has rattled nerves with its military and construction activities on the islands in the South China Sea, including building runways, though Beijing says most of what it is building is for civilian purposes, like lighthouses.

“Candidly speaking, a rapid and opaque increase in (China’s) military spending and unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the East and South China Seas under the aim of building a strong maritime state are having not only people in Japan, but countries in the Asia-Pacific region and the international community worried greatly,” Kishida said in a speech to business leaders.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, believed to have huge deposits of oil and gas. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims to parts of the waters, through which about $5 trillion in trade is shipped every year.

Kishida plans to visit China as early as Japan’s “Golden Week” extended holiday, which starts on Friday.

“Through candid dialogue with the Chinese side, I want to get the wheel turning to create the Sino-Japanese relations that are suitable for a new age,” he said.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Aftershocks bring Misery for Japan

Yuji Maeda cries as he watches search and rescue operation at a site where houses collapsed due to a landslide caused by an earthquake in Minamiaso town

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) – Aftershocks rattled survivors of deadly Japanese earthquakes on Wednesday, nearly a week after the first one struck, as the area braced for heavy rain and the possibility of more landslides.

Rescuers using backhoes and shovels to dig through crumpled houses swept away in a landslide found a woman’s body, one of several people still missing. Another death was confirmed later in the day, taking the toll to 48.

Hundreds of people in the Kumamoto area of southwestern Japan spent another night in their cars, afraid to return to damaged houses.

Medical experts warned of the danger of potentially fatal blood clots from sitting too long in cramped conditions after a 51-year-old woman died and at least 12 people were hospitalized.

Eleven people appear to have died of illnesses related to their prolonged stay in evacuation centers, NHK national television said. The first quake hit late last Thursday and the largest, at magnitude 7.3, some 27 hours later.

“I keep thinking the earthquakes will stop, but they just go on and on,” one woman at an evacuation center in Mashiki, one of the worst-hit areas, told NHK.

“It’s really scary.”

Of more than 680 aftershocks hitting Kyushu island since April 14, more than 89 have registered at magnitude 4 or more on Japan’s intensity scale, strong enough to shake buildings.

An earthquake of 5.8 magnitude struck off Japan’s northeast coast on Wednesday evening, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but there was no tsunami warning, nor were there any reports of damage or casualties.

The agency gave an initial magnitude of 6.1 for the quake that was centered 104 km (about 60 miles) southeast of Sendai, Honshu, near where a devastating quake and tsunami struck in March 2011, killing about 20,000 people.

On Kyushu, nearly 100,000 people were in evacuation centers, some huddling in blankets outside as night temperatures fell as low as 8 Celsius (46 Fahrenheit).

Heavy rain is expected over the area, raising fear that slopes weakened by the quakes could collapse.

Authorities have begun condemning buildings and other structures deemed unsafe. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of buildings collapsed, many brought down by their heavy roofs of traditional tiles.

Though public buildings must abide by stringent safety standards, the law is lax for private homes.

“When a big earthquake hits, structures may sustain damage that’s impossible to fix if there’s another quake within days,” said Akira Wada, professor emeritus at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Most of those who were killed had returned to their homes after the first quake.

(Additional reporting by Kwiyeon Ha; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Japan’s Death by Overwork on Rise

oad workers prepare a construction site at night in central Tokyo

By Stanley White

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan is witnessing a record number of compensation claims related to death from overwork, or “karoshi”, a phenomenon previously associated with the long-suffering “salary man” that is increasingly afflicting young and female employees.

Labor demand, with 1.28 jobs per applicant, is the highest since 1991, which should help Prime Minister Shinzo Abe draw more people into the workforce to counter the effect of a shrinking population, but lax enforcement of labor laws means some businesses are simply squeezing more out of employees, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Claims for compensation for karoshi rose to a record high of 1,456 in the year to end-March 2015, according to labor ministry data, with cases concentrated in healthcare, social services, shipping and construction, which are all facing chronic worker shortages.

Hiroshi Kawahito, secretary general of the National Defense Counsel for Victims of karoshi, said the real number was probably 10 times higher, as the government is reluctant to recognize such incidents.

“The government hosts a lot of symposiums and makes posters about the problem, but this is propaganda,” he said.

“The real problem is reducing working hours, and the government is not doing enough.”

The labor ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Kawahito, a lawyer who has been dealing with karoshi since the 1980s, said 95 percent of his cases used to be middle-aged men in white-collar jobs, but now about 20 percent are women.

Japan has no legal limits on working hours, but the labor ministry recognizes two types of karoshi: death from cardiovascular illness linked to overwork, and suicide following work-related mental stress.

A cardiovascular death is likely to be considered karoshi if an employee worked 100 hours of overtime in the month beforehand, or 80 hours of overtime in two or more consecutive months in the previous six.

A suicide could qualify if it follows an individual’s working 160 hours or more of overtime in one month or more than 100 hours of overtime for three consecutive months.

Work-related suicides are up 45 percent in the past four years among those 29 and younger, and up 39 percent among women, labor ministry data show.

TWO-TIER WORKFORCE

The problem has become more acute as Japan’s workforce has divided into two distinct categories – regular employees, and those on temporary or non-standard contracts, frequently women and younger people.

In 2015 non-regular employees made up 38 percent of the workforce, up from 20 percent in 1990, and 68 percent of them were women.

Lawyers and academic say unscrupulous employers operate a “bait-and-switch” policy, advertising a full-time position with reasonable working hours, but later offering the successful applicant a non-regular contract with longer hours, sometimes overnight or weekends, with no overtime pay.

Refusing overtime pay and break time are illegal, and the applicant could refuse the job, but activists say companies tell them they will be given regular contracts after six months or so.

They say young applicants often accept due to lack of experience, while women trying to re-enter the workforce after childbirth often feel it would be difficult to get a foothold elsewhere.

Emiko Teranishi, head of the Families Dealing with Karoshi support group, said she hears lots of complaints about hiring tactics, with some companies telling new hires that their salary includes 80 hours of overtime, and they must reimburse the company if they work less.

“Some people don’t even make minimum wage under this system,” said Teranishi, whose own husband committed suicide after working long hours.

Such abuses have become so common in the past 10 years that such companies have been dubbed “black” companies in the media.

Hirokazu Ouchi, a professor at Chukyo University, wrote a book last year about such companies when he realized some of his students were being treated illegally at their part-time jobs.

Ouchi said their hiring practices typically follow a similar pattern.

“Companies will hire someone for two to three years, but they have no intention of investing the time or the money to nurture that employee,” said Ouchi.

He added that the labor ministry lacked the manpower to follow up on complaints.

A ministry official working in corporate surveillance acknowledged that his department was somewhat short-staffed but the government was taking steps to recruit more every year. He declined to give his name as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Japan’s working-age population has been falling since the mid-1990s, which would normally lead companies to improve working conditions to attract workers, but Ouchi said it was not happening because they can get away with bending the rules.

“This is a way for companies to keep labor costs down, but it is also a path that leads to death by overwork,” he said.

(This version of the story was refiled to correct typo in paragraph 16 to read employers)

(Editing by Will Waterman)

Japan quake survivors face low food supply, closed factories

By Minami Funakoshi and Kaori Kaneko

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Japanese share market fell more than 3 percent on Monday after a series of earthquakes measuring up to 7.3 magnitude struck a southern manufacturing hub, killing at least 42 people and forcing major companies to close factories.

About 30,000 rescue workers were scouring the rubble for survivors and handing out food to those unable to return to their homes following the quakes which struck Kyushu island from Thursday. The biggest hit near Kumamoto city early on Saturday.

“There are still missing people. We want to make further efforts to rescue and save people and prioritize human lives,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament, adding he aimed to declare the region a disaster zone to free up reconstruction funds.

The Nikkei stock index ended 3.4 percent lower, hit by a stronger yen and as investors weighed the impact of the disaster on manufacturers’ supply chains and insurers.

Factories for major manufacturers including Toyota, Sony and Honda were closed, disrupting supply chains around the country.

Japan’s atomic regulator declared three nuclear plants in the region safe, giving a degree of comfort to a country deeply scarred by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 that was sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.

All commercial flights to the damaged Kumamoto airport were canceled and the bullet train service to the region was suspended.

Food was in short supply as roads remained cut off by landslides. Evacuees made an SOS signal out of chairs at a school playground, hoping to catch the attention of supply helicopters, Japanese media reported.

“Yesterday, I ate just one piece of tofu and a rice ball,” said the mayor of one of the areas affected. “What we’re most worried about now is food.”

Of more than 500 quakes hitting Kyushu since Thursday, more than 70 have been at least a four on Japan’s intensity scale, strong enough to shake buildings.

DESPERATE SEARCH

The Kumamoto region is an important manufacturing hub and home to Japan’s only operating nuclear station.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government would “take all the necessary measures” to support companies affected by the disaster and the economy more broadly, including tapping into reserve funds of 350 billion yen ($3.24 billion).

Abe said a sales tax increase next year would go ahead barring a financial crisis or major natural disaster, without elaborating on whether the quakes qualified as such a disaster.

On the stock market, Sony Corp and Toyota Motor led the sharp falls among manufacturers, dropping 6.8 percent and 4.8 percent respectively. Nissan Motor and Honda Motor both lost about 3 percent. Insurers and utilities were also sold, with nuclear plant operator Kyushu Electric Power slumping nearly 8 percent.

Toyota said it would suspend production at plants across Japan after the quakes disrupted its supply chain.

Electronics giant Sony said its Kumamoto image sensors plant would remain suspended. One of the company’s major customers for the sensors is Apple. Honda said production at its motorcycle plant in southern Japan would remain suspended through Friday.

Numerous aftershocks have rattled the region with one of 5.8 magnitude on Monday evening. There were no immediate reports of new damage or injuries.

Automotive chipmaker Renesas Electronics said earlier the aftershocks were keeping it from installing replacement equipment at a quake-hit plant.

The Kumamoto government said 42 people had been killed and nine were missing.

Thirty three people have been confirmed dead in Saturday’s quake and nine in the smaller tremor just over 24 hours earlier. The government said about 190 of the injured were in serious condition and some 110,000 people had been displaced.

Rescuers digging with their bare hands dragged some elderly survivors, still in pyjamas, out of the rubble and onto makeshift stretchers made of tatami mats.

“We can’t take a bath, we don’t have any clothes to change into – we just have what we ran out in,” a woman at one evacuation center told TBS television.

Public broadcaster NHK showed footage of forests and rice fields torn apart by the quake, saying one 50 km (31 miles) strip shifted almost 2 meters (6 feet) sideways.

Quakes are common in Japan, part of the seismically active “Ring of Fire” which sweeps from the South Pacific islands, up through Indonesia, Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coast of North, Central and South America.

At the other end of the ring this weekend, Ecuador’s biggest earthquake in decades killed at least 262 people, caused devastation in coastal towns and left an unknown number trapped in ruins.

A 9 magnitude quake and tsunami in northern Japan in March 2011 caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, shutting down the nuclear industry for safety checks and sending radiation spewing across the countryside.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the 2011 tsunami.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg, Elaine Lies, William Mallard, Shinichi Soashiro, Chris Gallagher, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Tim Kelly and Thomas Wilson; Writing by Stephen Coates; Editing by Robert Birsel and Ian Geoghegan)

Magnitude 7.4 earthquake strikes Southern Japan

A woman reacts at a health and welfare center acting as an evacuation center after an earthquake in Mashiki town, Kumamoto prefecture, southern Japan

(Reuters) – A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck southern Japan early on Saturday, just over 24 hours after a quake killed nine people and injured at least 1,000 in the same area.

The Saturday quake triggered a tsunami advisory, though it was later lifted and no irregularities were reported at three nuclear power plants in the area, Japanese media reported.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the Saturday quake though there were several reports of damage, including some collapsed buildings and cracked roads.

The epicenter of the quake was near the city of Kumamoto and measured at a shallow depth of 10 km, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake on Thursday evening in the same region was of 6.4 magnitude.

“Thursday’s quake might have been a foreshock of this one,” Shinji Toda, a professor at Tohoku University, told national broadcaster NHK.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said the Saturday quake was 7.1 magnitude and it initially issued a tsunami advisory, which identifies the presence of a marine threat and asks people to leave coastal regions, for the Ariake and Yatsushiro seas.

NHK said the advisory suggested a possible wave of one meter in height. The advisory was later lifted.

Several aftershocks rattled the region later on Saturday, including one of 5.8 magnitude.

NHK quoted an official at a hospital near the epicenter as saying it had lost power after the Saturday quake and had to use its generators.

Most of the casualties in the Thursday quake came in the town of Mashiki, near the epicenter, where several houses collapsed.

A magnitude 9 quake in March 2011, to the north of Tokyo, touched off a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima. Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the tsunami.

(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Writing by John Stonestreet; Editing by Robert Birsel and Martin Howell)

Aftershocks rattle Japan from strong quake ~ 7.4 Hits Friday

Local residents wrap themselves in blankets as they sit on the road in front of the town office building after an earthquake in Mashiki town, Kumamoto in april 2016

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) – Aftershocks rattled southwestern Japan on Friday after a strong quake the night before killed nine people, injured at least 1,000 and cut power and water across the region, forcing the temporary shutdown of several auto and electronics factories.

By afternoon, more than 130 aftershocks had hit the area around the city of Kumamoto in the wake of the initial 6.4 magnitude quake the night before. Officials said the frequency was tapering off but the risk of further strong aftershocks will remain for about a week.

While the magnitude of Thursday’s quake was much lower than that of the 9.0 March 11, 2011 quake that touched off a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, the intensity was similar because it struck on land and at a much shallower depth.

“We managed to huddle into a space, that’s why we were saved,” one man told NHK national television after he and his family were rescued from their collapsed house two hours after the quake hit. “We’re all safe, that’s what counts.”

More than 44,000 people initially fled to schools and community centers, some spending the night outside after the first quake hit around 9:30 p.m.

Roads cracked, houses crumbled, and tiles cascaded from the roof of the 400-year-old Kumamoto Castle in the center of the city.

Among those pulled from the wreckage was an eight-month-old baby girl, wrapped in a blanket and passed hand to hand by firefighters. Several hospitals had to evacuate patients.

Japanese stocks ended down 0.4 percent, with the impact of the quake limited primarily to regional shares that could experience some direct impact. Regional utility Saibu Gas Co Ltd finished 2.7 percent lower.

Several companies, including Honda Motor Corp, suspended operations at plants in the area.

More than 3,000 troops, police and firemen were dispatched to the area from around Japan, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said more would be sent if needed.

“We will do everything in our power to ensure the safety of local residents,” Abe told a parliamentary committee.

Most of the dead came from Mashiki, a town of around 34,000 people near the epicenter of the quake, where firefighters battled a blaze late on Thursday. Daylight showed splintered houses under tiled roofs and an apartment building whose ground floor was pulverized, where two people died.

“I want to go home, but we couldn’t do anything there,” one boy at an evacuation center told TBS television as he bounced a baby in his arms.

Though the intensity of Thursday’s quake on the Japanese scale matched that of the March 2011 quake that left nearly 20,000 dead, the absence of a tsunami helped keep the death toll down.

Service on the Shinkansen superfast train in Kyushu was halted after one train derailed, and highways were closed after some sections collapsed. About 12,200 households were without electricity as of 12 p.m. (0500 GMT), according to Kyushu Electric Power Co Inc;, while some 58,000 lacked water.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said there were no irregularities at three nuclear plants on the southern major island of Kyushu and nearby Shikoku.

Sony Corp., Mitsubishi Electric Corp and tire maker Bridgestone Corp. also suspended operations at factories in the area.

The 2011 quake temporarily crippled part of Japan’s auto supply chain, but some companies have since adjusted the industry’s “Just in Time” production philosophy in a bid to limit any repeat of the costly disruption.

(Additional reporting by Joshua Hunt, Naomi Tajitsu and Tokyo newsroom; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

Earthquake hits Southern Japan

Broken dishes are seen at a restaurant after an earthquake in Kumamoto, southern Japan

By Kiyoshi Takenaka

TOKYO (Reuters) – An earthquake of magnitude 6 hit southern Japan on Thursday, bringing down some buildings and injuring dozens of people, local media reported, but the nuclear regulator reported no problems at power plants.

The quake struck 11 km (7 miles) east of the city of Kumamoto, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It initially said the magnitude was 6.2 but revised it down. Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the quake registered 6.4.

There was no tsunami warning, but Japan’s chief government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, said several buildings had collapsed. He gave no more details.

“We intend to do the utmost to grasp the situation,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters. “I’m now planning to hear what we have gathered on the situation.”

The Kyodo news agency reported that around 40 people were being treated at a hospital in Kumamoto city, some of them seriously injured.

A fire also broke out in Mashiki, a town of about 34,000 people near the epicenter of the quake. NHK broadcaster showed footage of firefighters tackling a blaze at a building.

Some 16,000 households in the area were without electricity and 38,000 homes had no gas supplies in Kumamoto, Japanese media reported.

At least one aftershock struck the region.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said there were no irregularities at three nuclear plants on the southernmost island of Kyushu and nearby Shikoku.

Some high-speed trains were halted as a precaution.

Japanese media showed watermelons falling from shelves at a supermarket in Kumamoto, located around 1,900 km (1,150 miles) west of Tokyo.

A quake of 9 magnitude quake struck offshore north of Tokyo in March 2011, causing tsunami waves along the coast which killed nearly 20,000 people and triggered a meltdown at a nuclear power plant.

(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Editing by Robert Birsel and Mike Collett-White)