Town north of Kobe and west of Kyoto experiences heat one resident describes as feeling “homicidal.”

Having grown up in a town where it never snows before later moving to Japan, winters here are pretty rough for me. I basically use up my entire allotment of weather-related complaints between December and February, so when summer rolls around, I generally try to keep a positive attitude and roll with the punches the sun throws at us, an attitude that I’ll admit is easier to do when you have a job that allows you to work in what’s essentially beach attire and no one side-eyes you for eating shaved ice at your desk.

As a result, it’s a pretty reliable indicator that Japan is experiencing extreme temperatures when even I find myself grumbling, “Yeah, it’s too hot today,” and when that reaches “OK, it’s way too hot,” temperatures have probably gotten dangerous. Sure enough, that thought was flashing through my head on Wednesday this week, and it turns out that July 30 was the hottest day on record ever in Japan.

The daytime high on July 30 in the city of Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, was 41.2 degrees Celsius, or 106.16 degrees Fahrenheit. This broke the previous all-time observed high in Japan of 41.1 degrees, which was recorded twice, in Kumagaya, Saitama, in 2018 and again in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, in 2020.

▼ On-the-street interviews with Tamba residents on the record-setting day, with one man describing the heat as “homicidal” and another saying that it was so intense that he had trouble breathing as soon as he exited his car.

▼ Tamba is about an hour and 15 minutes north of Kobe by car, but with a more inland location that doesn’t provide the same insulating effects that portside Kobe benefits from.

It’s already been an exceptionally hot and dry summer in Japan so far this year, and on Wednesday a high pressure area stretched across most of the country’s main island of Honshu (which includes Tamba), producing clear skies with minimal cloud cover to block any of the scorching sunshine. Elsewhere in Japan on that day, Fukuchiyama in Kyoto Prefecture reached a daytime high of 40.6 degrees Celsius, its first time ever to cross the 40-degree threshold, and parts of Osaka Prefecture also rose past 39 degrees. In Tokyo, 66 people, ranging in age from 13 to 98 years old, had to be transported to medical facilities for emergency treatment for heat-related conditions, though thankfully with no resulting deaths.

Heat exhaustion warnings were issued by the Japanese government for the prefectures of Aichi, Akita, Ehime, Fukui, Fukuoka, Gifu, Hiroshima, Hyogo, Ishikawa, Kagawa, Kochi, Kumamoto, Kyoto, Nagano, Nagasaki, Niigata, Oita, Okayama, Osaka, Shiga, Shimane, Tottori, Toyama, Wakayama, Yamagata, Yamaguchi, and Yamanashi, as well as parts of Kagoshima and Okinawa. That’s a total of 29 prefectures, more than half of Japan’s total of 47, meaning that the list of prefectures that didn’t have warnings was considerably shorter than the list of those that did.

Fortunately, Tamba got a mild respite from the heat on Thursday, though still with a shocking daytime high of 39.2 degrees. A typhoon predicted to pass by Japan off the country’s eastern edge this weekend is expected to cool things down further, but health officials are still cautioning people to drink plenty of fluids, avoid strenuous activity in direct sunlight and during the midday hours, and to run their air conditioners to prevent their homes from getting superheated, with that last one being something that not everyone in Japan always thinks to do without some governmental coaxing.

Source: NHK via Hachima Kiko, Tenki.jp
Top image: Pakutaso
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