AKIPRESS.COM - Typhoon Malakas has hit southern Japan, bringing damaging winds and flooding rain, reports Al Jazeera.

Malakas made landfall on the island of Kyushu on Monday. It struck as the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane on the five point Saffir-Simpson scale. Sustained winds of up to 185 kilometers an hour were reported.

Interaction with the islands of Japan is now causing Malakas to weaken rapidly. Now downgraded to a tropical storm, Malakas is expected to be little more than a tropical depression soon after it exits Japan and disintegrates over the cool waters of the northern Pacific.

Although maximum wind gusts will have dropped to 110km/h or less, the storm is expected to continue to drop huge amounts of rain right across Shikoku and Honshu.

The east coast of Kyushu seems to have experienced a remarkably intense period of rainfall. A 24-hour rainfall total of 578 mm was reported at Nobeoka, and nearby Miyazaki recorded 310 mm. The town of Takanabe saw 110 mm fall in just one hour.

Malakas’s impact has already been considerable. Across six prefectures of western Japan, more than 600,000 people were advised to leave their homes.

More than 100 domestic flights were cancelled, and road and rail transportation was also disrupted.

Malakas is the sixth typhoon to make landfall in Japan in 2016.