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© Agence France-PresseDozens of people were injured and more than 100 flights cancelled as strong Typhoon Ma-On lashed southern Japan on Wednesday with torrential downpours and gale-force winds, meteorologists and reports said.
Typhoon Ma-On swerved away from Japan's Pacific coast on Wednesday, leaving one person dead and dozens of others injured and damaging a centuries-old castle in Kyoto, officials and reports said.

The storm system, packing winds of up to 108kmh, was located 140km offshore on Wednesday, slowly heading east and further from the main island of Honshu.

The Japan Meteorogical Agency said Ma-On was still expected to bring downpours overnight in the country's eastern and northern regions including coastal areas hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which sparked a crisis at a nuclear power plant in the area.

The drowned body of an 84-year-old man was found on the bank of a river on Shikoku Island on Wednesday after he went missing a day earlier while checking his boat, local police said.

The eye of Ma-On, which spanned 1,600km, made landfall on Shikoku in southwestern Japan late Tuesday, bringing up to 120cm of rain since Sunday, the weather agency said.

It also sideswiped a peninsula south of Osaka later as it moved at 15kmh.

Source: Agence France-Presse