Two employees of the Japanese store Habita died in a shopping mall explosion in Kumamoto prefecture after their supervisor told them to go back inside the building to move cash from registers into a safe, according to the BBC.

The two workers were among 38 people killed when a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck Kumamoto on 28 July 2026. Seven of those deaths happened at Aeon Mall, the shopping complex in Kashima Town where Habita ran a store. Most shoppers left the mall right after the quake. But some employees were still inside about an hour later when an explosion ripped through the building's south side, as confirmed by retailer Aeon (NHK).

One of the victims has been identified as 22-year-old Kurumi Otake. The name of the second worker has not been released. According to Otake's family, she told a relative waiting outside Aeon Mall that she had to go back inside because her company had asked her to move money from the cash register into a safe. She never came back out.

Otake's relative, speaking to the Asahi Shimbun, described her as someone with a strong sense of justice. She had been helping support her mother after her father died three years earlier (BBC).

On 2 August, a Habita executive gave the bereaved family a document describing what happened and apologized, as reported by the Chosun Ilbo (Chosun Ilbo). Two company representatives also went to Otake's wake on Sunday to apologize to her family in person.

Habita sales director Koji Yuse, 64, told the Asahi Shimbun that telling employees to go back into the building was a mistake and that the company was deeply sorry for the loss of two precious lives. He told reporters at the wake, "Looking back now, it was not worth a life," as reported by Kyodo. Yuse separately told NHK that the instructions given at the time were inappropriate and that he truly regretted them (Asahi Shimbun).

Habita, founded in 1976, runs more than ten stores across several prefectures. The company was still figuring out how to handle the matter, NHK reported (BBC).

The earthquake and the explosion that followed at Aeon Mall led to a grim rescue effort. Kumamoto Prefecture first reported two women in their 20s dead and one person in cardiac arrest at the mall on 28 July (NHK). Rescue teams eventually pulled twelve people from the site. Seven of them had died and the rest were injured (NHK). Japan's Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae said 30 people had died across the series of earthquakes in the Kyushu region as of 30 July. That number was later raised to 38 (NHK).

The broader context here matters. The gap between the quake and the explosion was about an hour, which raises serious questions about why the building was not fully cleared of people in that time. The mall's evacuation worked well for shoppers. But at least one employer chose to send staff back inside to protect cash, putting company property ahead of emergency safety rules. And since employees from different stores stayed in the building, this was not just one manager's bad call. It points to a wider failure to judge the risk properly across the whole facility.

Japan has spent decades building one of the world's strongest earthquake response systems. The core rule is simple: get everyone out, fast, no exceptions. This case complicates that record. A boss telling workers to grab cash before a deadly blast tests where employer authority ends and worker safety begins. Japanese regulators have looked at this question before, especially after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, when similar concerns arose about employees told to stay at or return to dangerous sites. Whether the Kumamoto event leads to new laws, a criminal investigation, or updated safety rules for stores in earthquake zones is now up to local prosecutors and Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Habita chose to apologize at a wake rather than hold a press conference, which suggests the company knows it faces legal and reputational risk. But no formal accountability process has been announced yet.

For Otake's family, the corporate apology came six days after the earthquake took her life. She was 22.