TOKYO (AFP) - Rescue workers recovered a woman's body Thursday from mud and rubble that filled a nursing home after a landslide, raising to 11 the death toll after heavy rains hit western Japan, police said.

Soldiers, police and emergency services staff continued their search for seven people still missing in the aftermath of floods and landslides triggered two days ago by rainy-season torrential downpours in the region.

"Search operations are getting more and more difficult, but we are working on the assumption that there are survivors," said a police spokesman by telephone from hard-hit Yamaguchi prefecture on Honshu island.

One person was still missing on the mud-filled ground floor of the nursing home where at least six people died when a large landslide Tuesday hit the building in Hofu City, 750 kilometres (470 miles) west of Tokyo.

"We found the body of a woman inside the bathing facility on the ground floor in the afternoon. We have yet to identify her," another police officer told AFP.

"We are not certain if she was bathing at the time of the landslide."

Rescue workers on Thursday afternoon also recovered a man?s remains from a field near a country highway, where flows of mud and rocks hit a dozen cars and damaged some houses, police said.

It was the second body found there, and two others were still missing in the highway area, some five kilometres (three miles) from the nursing home.

Of the 11 dead, 10 were killed in Yamaguchi and one, a man, drowned in a flooded river in the neighbouring prefecture of Tottori.

At the nursing home, a man and a woman were found dead late Wednesday, a police official said, adding that "both died after being suffocated by mud".

Some 700 workers from the police, fire brigades and the Ground Self-Defence Force were operating in Hofu on Thursday, a city official said.

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