The Hiroshima municipal and prefectural governments held a memorial service on Thursday afternoon to mark the first anniversary of mudslides that killed 75 people.

In the morning before the ceremony, families of the victims and other mourners laid flowers and gifts and prayed for the victims at landslide-hit locations.

In the early hours of Aug. 20 last year, torrential rain caused a series of landslides in residential areas close to mountains in the city.

The scale of damage prompted the Diet to revise the landslide prevention law, and the municipal government to revise local disaster prevention plans.

In Hiroshima, work has begun on the construction of mudslide control dams at 35 locations. However, only one dam has been completed, and about 180 disaster-affected families still live in temporary housing.

The death toll included a woman whose death in March was deemed related to the disaster.