An earthquake struck Kumamoto Prefecture at 4:27 in the afternoon on 28 July. NHK reported 39 dead as of two o'clock on 13 August — a count that includes people whose deaths are being examined as disaster-related — and 3,684 people in shelters.
Seven people were killed at one of the buildings damaged that day. Staff and shoppers had left Aeon Mall Kumamoto, in Kashima Town, after the shaking. At around ten to six an explosion hit the south-central part of the complex. All seven worked for tenant shops, and all are believed to have gone back inside after evacuating.
Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun has been collecting accounts from the survivors. A 22-year-old woman was working on the second floor when the quake hit. She left her belongings, guided customers out and went down the stairs to an entrance on the north-east side of the ground floor. Several dozen people waited outside it for about an hour, she said, until a staff member who looked like a security guard opened the door and people began going in one after another. Nobody asked whether she worked there, and nobody stopped her. At least ten went in that way, customers among them; one moved briskly towards the food floor with a shopping basket on their head, apparently in place of a helmet. She was back inside twenty minutes before the blast. "Depending on the timing, there could have been more victims," she said.
Practice differed door to door. At the north-central entrance, one employee was told that anyone who could not go home without their valuables should enter in small groups. At the north-west entrance, saying you were an employee was enough.
Some got back in without staff noticing at all. A shopper who had evacuated with her husband realised their purchases were still in a refrigerated locker on the east side of the ground-floor food level; he went back for them.
Aeon's president, Akio Yoshida, was asked at a press conference on 29 July whether any announcement had told people they could return. He said there had been none and denied it flatly. The company says neither its own staff nor tenant employees re-enter once evacuated, and its press office says that, as of now, it cannot confirm that any instruction or permission was given.
The tenant operators describe it differently. Habita, which ran a second-floor variety shop, apologised to the family of Kurumi Otake, 22, who died in the explosion, saying it had told staff to go back and put the shop's takings in the safe.
Why it is on the board
It was fifth on the most-read list of Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun when we collected — the prefecture's own daily, three weeks after the earthquake, still carrying testimony about the forty minutes between the evacuation and the blast.
확인: 熊本日日新聞 · NHK