YMAGATA/AKITA: One person has died and three others have gone missing amid severe rain in the northeastern Japan prefectures of Yamagata and Akita, police said Friday.

An 86-year-old man was found dead near a river in the city of Akita Friday morning. In the Akita city of Yuzawa, a male worker in his 60s has gone missing since a landslide on Thursday.

Yamagata prefectural police have lost contact with two officers who were heading by police car to a resident who had made a distress call in the city of Shinjo. The police believe that the car was swept away. The resident was rescued.

The Mogami River overflooded in the Yamagata village of Tozawa in the early hours of Friday, according to the land ministry.

The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a second emergency warning for heavy rain for parts of Yamagata late Thursday, which was downgraded to a warning Friday morning.

Calls for emergency safety measures, the highest level in Japan’s five-tier alert system for weather-related disasters, were issued for parts of Yamagata and the Akita city of Yurijhonjo.

The city of Shinjo saw 389 millimeters of rainfall in the 24 hours through 6:40 a.m. Friday, the highest on record.

East Japan Railway Co., or JR East, said Friday that it will suspend services between Yamagata and Shinjo stations on the Yamagata Shinkansen bullet train line the whole day due to the heavy rain. The Akita Shinkansen line is running as usual.

Mobile phone carriers NTT Docomo Inc., KDDI Corp. and Rakuten Mobile Inc. said that voice and data communication disruptions were occurring in parts of Yamagata and Akita Friday due to base station power outages caused by the heavy rain.

JIJI Press