Record rain floods Japan's quake-scarred Noto Peninsula, forcing evacuation advisories for 380,000

TOKYO — A line of intense storm cells stalled over the base of Japan's Noto Peninsula before dawn on Thursday, dropping record amounts of rain in a matter of hours and prompting the Japan Meteorological Agency to issue its highest-level emergency warning for heavy rain, the rarely used alert reserved for disasters "expected to occur only once every few decades." By the time the warning was lifted 10 hours later, rivers had overflowed at 11 points, roads and rail lines had shut down across two prefectures, and evacuation advisories covered more than 380,000 residents in a region still rebuilding from a devastating earthquake.

No deaths or injuries had been confirmed as of Thursday evening, according to both national and local officials, but the storm renewed anxiety in an area that has already suffered two major disasters in the past 20 months.

Rain gauges break records across two prefectures

The JMA issued the country's highest-level alert for heavy rain at 6:20 a.m. local time for the city of Himi in Toyama Prefecture and the city of Hakui and the towns of Shika, Hodatsushimizu and Nakanoto in neighboring Ishikawa — all clustered around the narrow neck where the Noto Peninsula meets the rest of Honshu. Six-hour rainfall had already reached 211 millimeters in Himi and 210 millimeters in Hakui when the warning went out; by mid-morning, 24-hour totals climbed to a record 327.5 millimeters in Himi and 322 millimeters in Hakui, with radar showing bursts of nearly 100 millimeters an hour tearing through Hakui and Shika at the storm's peak.

The flooding, landslides and stranded vehicles that followed were first reported widely by wire services; The Associated Press reported that the two prefectures ultimately advised more than 380,000 people to seek shelter on higher ground, up sharply from the roughly 180,000 residents covered when the emergency warning was first issued at dawn. By the afternoon, Ishikawa's prefectural government said at a 2:30 p.m. briefing that 80 homes had taken on floor-level water, five districts across three municipalities — home to roughly 270 households — had been cut off by flooding, and 91 shelters across 13 municipalities were housing 639 evacuees. Ten rivers had overflowed at eleven points and two levees had breached; a stretch of the JR Hakui rail line was flooded and its tracks damaged, and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. reported outages to more than 1,000 homes.

Rescue crews deployed as transit shuts down

Local rescue teams in Hakui City pulled an estimated 30 to 40 people from flooded streets and homes by rubber boat as water rose through the morning, the regional daily Hokkoku Shimbun reported; officials there identified the two breached levees as sitting on the Iiyama and Kanemaru rivers. In Himi, across the prefectural border in Toyama, relief workers waded through knee-high water to reach stranded residents and pull motorists from vehicles stalled on submerged roads. The disruption reached well beyond the flood zone itself: Komatsu Airport canceled five flights to Haneda, one to Sapporo and eight to Fukuoka by midday, National Route 8 was closed along a 1.6-kilometer stretch after rainfall exceeded regulatory thresholds, and both directions of the Hokuriku Expressway between the Tonami and Toyama-Kosugi interchanges remained shut as of 11 p.m. The JR Nanao Line and IR Ishikawa Railway suspended service for the entire day, the Noto Railway halted trains temporarily, and a section of the Hokuriku Railway Ishikawa Line closed between two stations. Ishikawa authorities closed ten public schools on Thursday and ordered twelve more shut, with three delaying their opening, for Friday as the ground remained saturated.

A region still rebuilding from disaster

The towns under the emergency warning sit at the base of the same peninsula devastated by the magnitude-7.6 earthquake of January 1, 2024, which killed more than 470 people when direct and disaster-related deaths are combined and left roughly 150,000 structures damaged, according to a one-year assessment of the region's slow recovery. That earthquake triggered more than 2,000 landslides and left hillsides across Ishikawa loosened and unstable — a vulnerability that turned deadly again in September 2024, when heavy rain on the same slopes killed 16 more people and set off fresh landslides on ground still cracked from the quake. Engineers responded by covering exposed hillsides in plastic sheeting to slow water infiltration, a stopgap measure that remains in place in parts of the peninsula. As of December 2025, roughly 13,000 people were still living in temporary housing across ten municipalities in Ishikawa, according to the Nikkei business daily, with more than 80% of eligible households having sought extensions beyond the standard two-year occupancy limit because permanent replacement housing has yet to be built — leaving thousands in prefabricated units on the same ground now soaked by record rain.

Government response and a cautious forecast

Chief Cabinet Secretary Kihara Minoru said at a morning press conference that no casualties had been reported as of 10:30 a.m., while confirming six rivers had flooded in Ishikawa and three in Toyama. Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae directed relevant ministries to assess the damage quickly and keep the public informed, Kihara told reporters at the government's regular briefing that morning.

"Several rivers overflowed in the two prefectures, flooding many homes without reported injuries," Kihara said.

The JMA downgraded its emergency warning to a lower-level advisory at 4:20 p.m., but cautioned residents against complacency. According to Jiji Press, the agency forecast up to 20 centimeters of additional rain over the Kaga and Noto areas through Friday morning and warned that saturated, quake-weakened ground left the region at continued risk of landslides and further river flooding even after the heaviest bands moved on. Road closures had grown from eight locations Thursday morning to 22 by the afternoon, and rescue teams remained on standby for the isolated districts on the peninsula's western flank.

Thursday's storm was not isolated to Noto. A similar Level 5 warning issued over Chiba Prefecture earlier this month proved far deadlier: the JMA recorded 351 millimeters of rain in a single day at Chiba station on August 13, the highest daily total since records began in 1966, including 115 millimeters in one hour that broke a decades-old record. Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force evacuated roughly 4,000 people stranded at Soga train station, and the prefectural government's death toll climbed over the following days to 13, with more than 2,300 homes flooded — a grim benchmark that explains why Thursday's warning over Noto, even without a confirmed death, was treated by Tokyo as an emergency rather than routine weather.