It hit at 4:27 p.m. on a Tuesday — the kind of ordinary hour when parents are picking up groceries, commuters are heading home, and nobody is thinking about disaster. Then a 7.1-magnitude earthquake tore through Kumamoto Prefecture on Japan’s southwestern island of Kyushu, registering a shindo 7 — the highest possible reading on Japan’s seismic intensity scale. By Wednesday morning, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi confirmed at least 13 people had died, with officials warning that number could still climb as rescue crews dig through the wreckage.

The damage sprawled across the region almost immediately. Highway overpasses buckled on the Kyushu Expressway. A train derailed at Yatsushiro Station. The entire Kyushu Shinkansen bullet train line was suspended. Tens of thousands of homes lost power. Even the four-century-old Kumamoto Castle, a national landmark that has weathered earthquakes before, sustained damage to its stone walls. And this wasn’t a single, isolated jolt — strong aftershocks continued rattling the island for hours afterward, keeping already-shaken residents on edge.

PT: Chaos and Collapse at Aeon Mall

Nowhere did the disaster hit harder than at the Aeon Mall in Kashima Town, one of the region’s largest shopping centers. Witnesses and local fire officials reported an explosion, likely tied to a gas leak, that tore through the second floor shortly after the quake struck. The blast collapsed part of the structure and blew away sections of the exterior wall, trapping shoppers and employees inside. Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported that 20 to 30 mall workers couldn’t be reached by phone in the immediate aftermath. Rescue crews worked through the night pulling people from the rubble, and more than 90 people were treated at hospitals in Kumamoto and Yatsushiro. Nearby, at a Nippon Paper Industries plant in Yatsushiro City, a chimney stack snapped and collapsed, leaving nine employees unaccounted for.

It’s the kind of scene that tests a country’s emergency systems in real time — and by most accounts, Japan’s held.

PT: Takaichi Moves Fast, Not Slow

Within hours, Prime Minister Takaichi stood up an emergency disaster task force and put herself at the head of it. She didn’t wait for red tape to catch up with the moment. By Wednesday, the Self-Defense Forces had deployed roughly 3,600 personnel to the disaster zone, a number that was later reinforced to nearly 4,600, alongside about 2,000 police officers and 1,400 firefighters.