A landslide occurred Saturday in northeastern Japan, destroying or damaging about 10 buildings and leaving an elderly couple missing, police and firefighters said.
Authorities have deployed heavy machinery and mobilized more than 240 personnel to search for the man in his 80s and his wife in her 70s.
The landslide, measuring 20 to 30 meters in height and 100 meters in width, occurred at a mountain in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, shortly before 1 a.m.
The prefectural government has requested that the Self-Defense Forces be dispatched to the area, while the city has issued an evacuation order for 22 people from eight households in the area due to the risk of secondary disasters.
Contact has already been established with 20 of them, the city said.
Many of the buildings caught in the mudslide are believed to be vacant houses or garages, but a man in his 70s and a woman in her 60s were trapped in one of the collapsed homes for more than two hours before being rescued.
"It was unnerving because I didn't know if the house would collapse further," the man later told reporters.
Isao Akojima, a former professor of geomorphology at Yamagata University, said the landslide was likely caused by a large amount of melted snow and rain loosening subsoil on the mountain, which is made of weathered mudstone more than 15 million years old.
The city has seen a record amount of precipitation, including snow, for the month of December as of Friday, according to the Yamagata Meteorological Office.
While landslides in Yamagata often occur in spring for the same reason when the snow melts, "a frequency of once every few decades or few hundred years makes it difficult to predict when they will occur," Akojima said.
