A stretch of brick sidewalk in Nagoya near a construction site caved in by about 5 meters on Monday evening but there were no injuries.
The Aichi Prefectural Police closed traffic around the site and launched an investigation.
According to the police, the site, where about 4 sq. meters of sidewalk sank, is about 300 meters from Meitetsu Nagoya Station. It is also near a construction site where Takenaka Corp. was connecting a building with an underground passageway. Only curbstones separating the sunken brick sidewalk from a street remain.
Takenaka said the collapse was caused by a sinkhole created when the company was pumping out water at the construction site at around 5:00 p.m. They possibly pumped out water containing sand and soil, it said.
"We are sorry for the trouble," Kazuhiko Tanimura of the company's Nagoya office told reporters at the construction site.