36,000 Kumamoto households still without water: media

Japan's public broadcaster NHK cited sources from Kumamoto Prefectureon in a report on Friday, saying around 36,880 households in Kumamoto Prefecture are still without water 10 days after a massive earthquake struck the region.

The strong earthquake temporarily cut off water supply to more than 100,000 households in the region.

The report said that the water outage problem across the entire Kumamoto Prefecture is not expected to be resolved until the end of this month.

The earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 struck Kumamoto at 16:27 local time on July 28, and aftershocks have continued ever since.

Chinese stocks closing higher on Friday indicates more participation and broader confidence in the market, said China Global Television Network (CGTN) analyst Timothy Pope.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index up 1.02 percent to 3,940.04 points. The Shenzhen Component Index closed 1.42 percent higher at 14,311.01 points. Also, the ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, gained 1.35 percent to close at 3,563.12 points.

The rally can be contributed to several reasons.

"This week started with a rout for tech shares, but that pretty quickly turned into a relief rally. And it got another boost today from better-than-expected trade data, which had exports looking particularly strong, helped in part by the global AI buildout," Pope said.

He then said that there is no particular sector that outstandingly led the pack.

"The market has rebounded from Monday's sell-off, but investors still can't seem to decide which sector they should be chasing. The favorite can change almost by the hour at the moment, with uncertainty still hanging over the durability of the AI rally and the valuations of some of the big players there. Still, turnover was up again today. So at the very least, we're seeing more participation and broader confidence -- just in the market as a whole, rather than in any one particular sector or theme," said Pope.