Aerial footage from Japanese TV showed teams of rescuers going through small clusters of destroyed buildings.
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The tremors struck the Kumamoto prefecture within little more than 24 hours: a 6.5-magnitude late Thursday, a 5.3 early Saturday and a 7.4 later Saturday.
In the village of Minamiaso, 10 people were “out of contact”, said public broadcaster NHK.
A son helps his mother as they leave from their collapsed house at a landslide site caused by an quake where his father is missing in Minamiaso town, southern Japan in this photo taken by Kyodo April 17, 2016.
The government said Saturday that there were “multiple locations where people have been buried alive” as it sent in 25,000 troops, firefighters, medics and other rescue personnel.
Speaking from his severely shaken home, he said there had been more than 150 aftershocks since the first quake hit on Friday.
Heavy rain, combined with the risk of more aftershocks than the 130 to hit the area so far, has also hampered rescue efforts and ratcheted up fears of landslides.
Saturday’s natural disaster apparently defied official expectations.
That same day, though several time zones apart, Ecuador felt the brunt of a big 7.8 magnitude quake at 8 pm local time.
“It’s full in there”. There’s not an inch to sleep or even walk about in there.
In the badly-affected town of Mashiki, few of the traditional style wooden houses remained intact, and their occupants described the hardships of surviving in the destruction.
The American military played a large role in rescue and relief during the March 2011 tsunami and quake disasters in northeastern Japan. The first reactor to restart was Kyushu Electric’s Sendai No. 1, which is at one of the plants in the region hit on Saturday.
Both quakes were shallow and struck close to the city of Kumamoto, causing huge damage to roads, bridges, tunnels, homes and buildings.
Electronics giant Sony Corp said its Kumamoto image sensors plant would remain suspended.
Four Okinawa-based MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft were scheduled to haul 20 tons of supplies, including food, water and blankets, to the village of Minamiaso, Kumamoto, on Monday after loading the supplies at a Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force camp in Mashiki, Kumamoto. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at an emergency meeting in the evening that, “It has already started raining and the rain and winds are expected to get stronger”.
“I can’t even imagine when we can start the recovery process”.
Many people have been sleeping out in the open and away from buildings, in case of further quakes, but with bad weather forecast, there are fears they will be vulnerable to the elements.
A Kumamoto official said more than 44,000 people spent the night in shelters after fleeing their homes Thursday.
Evacuees in some rural areas of Kumamoto prefecture have received only limited supplies of water, food and other daily necessities, the local Nishinihon newspaper reported.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency said that the massive quake on Saturday was the main event while the 6.5-magnitude quake earlier that killed at least 9 people was a foreshock.
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Toyota Motor Corp. said it would shut down most of its vehicle production in Japan over the course of this week because of parts shortages stemming from the earthquakes.
