Japanese rescue teams find more bodies in rubble
Updated
![Rescuers pull a victim from the Komanoyu hotel, hit by a landslide after the 7.2 magnitude quake in northern Japan. [AFP]](http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/img/news/base/japan_quake_afp_150608.jpg "Rescuers pull a victim from the Komanoyu hotel, hit by a landslide after the 7.2 magnitude quake in northern Japan. [AFP]")
Rescuers pull a victim from the Komanoyu hotel, hit by a landslide after the 7.2 magnitude quake in northern Japan. [AFP]
Japanese troops have recovered the bodies of three people from the muddy rubble of a resort hotel in Japan, as rescue teams continue searching for four others believed buried there after a strong earthquake.
The discovery of the three victims -- two women and one man -- raised the death toll from Saturday's quake in the north of the country to nine, with more than 220 injured.
The Komanoyu hotel, a secluded inn with natural hot springs had survived for nearly four centuries but its been reduced to a heap of mud, wood and shattered furniture.
The government deployed about 800 troops to the disaster zone to hunt for survivors after the earthquake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale, making it the strongest in inland Japan in eight years.
A total of 12 people remain unaccounted for, including the four at the hotel.
Military helicopters have been operating over the rice fields and rolling hills of the region, moving to safety more than 330 people who were cut off from the world as the tremor snapped bridges and buried roads with landslides.
There have been more than two-hundred severe aftershocks.
