TOKYO — Most of the quarter-million people who fled massive flooding in southwest Japan were able to return home by Monday, but the danger had not fully passed from record rains that have killed at least 28 people.
Thousands of homes and hundreds of roads were damaged, and hundreds of landslides were reported. The military airlifted food by helicopter to stranded districts.
The rain ‘‘was like a waterfall,’’ Yoko Yoshika said in Yamaguchi prefecture. ‘‘It was horrible.’’ Yoshika, wife of an award-winning Hagi-yaki style potter, said workers used a bucket relay with plastic pails to get rid of the water flowing into their shop.
In Yame, a city of 69,000 in Fukuoka Prefecture, dozens of people were stranded by the flooding.
‘‘Our region gets hit with heavy rain every year, but I have never experienced anything like this,’’ city employee Kumi Takesue said.
‘‘Rice paddies and roads all became water so you couldn’t tell what was what,’’ she said, adding that she had to wade in knee-high water near her home, even though the area was not hit as hard as other areas.
Kyodo News service said 28 people have died, and police were searching for four missing people in the three prefectures of Kumamoto, Oita, and Fukuoka, from the heavy rainfall that began last Thursday. Nationwide tallies of the dead and missing were not immediately available.
Fukuoka Prefecture said that as of Monday, damage there extended to more than 4,300 homes, 800 roads, and 20 bridges.