Tropical Storm Shanshan lashed southern Japan with record rainfall and powerful winds today, flooding towns, knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes, disrupting travel and forcing more than 4 million evacuations.

The storm, the strongest to hit Japan this year, had maximum sustained winds of up to 46 mph and gusts of 51 mph early Friday, according to the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which downgraded Shanshan from a typhoon to a tropical storm today.

Shanshan had peaked at a strength equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane before making landfall as a typhoon around 8 a.m. on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. It was forecast to move north through Kyushu before shifting east Friday and Saturday, moving farther inland and losing strength.

The storm was weakening as it moved slowly inland, but authorities issued warnings for landslides and floods in many parts of southwestern Japan. More than 4.1 million people were under evacuation orders nationwide, Japan’s Cabinet Office said today.

“This is one of the biggest typhoons in recent years, for a prefecture that experiences many typhoons every year,” Kensei Tomisako, a disaster response official in Satsumasendai, said in an interview.

Shanshan has brought record rainfall. Some parts of Kyushu recorded 2.6 feet of rain in 48 hours, forecasters said. The storm, inching north at less than 4 mph early Friday, lashed some areas with rain for hours.

Three people died after a landslide Tuesday buried their home in Gamagori, a city in central Japan that was hit by heavy rain, the local government said early today. Another person died after a roof collapsed in Kamiita Town, according to Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK.

More than 80 people were injured in the storm, and one person was missing, the news agency said. More than 128,000 households were without power early Friday in Kyushu, the service provider Kyushu Electric Power Transmission and Distribution said.

Japan Airlines, one of the country’s largest airlines, canceled all flights to and from Nagasaki and seven other cities in Shanshan’s path this and said that many flights to and from 20 cities across the country Friday had already been canceled. All Nippon Airways also canceled all flights that had been scheduled at Kansai International Airport for Friday.

Shinkansen bullet-train service was suspended today for all of Kyushu, along with service between Tokyo and Osaka, because of heavy rain. Many of the train lines linking major cities in western Japan, including Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima, were also suspended.

On Wednesday, authorities issued rare emergency warnings for the storm in Kagoshima prefecture, indicating that a large-scale disaster was possible, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. The warnings were downgraded this morning.

Toyota announced that it would pause production at all 14 of its Japan factories starting Wednesday evening. The carmaker said this morning that it would extend the suspension until Friday for all but one of the factories.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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