Baby, it's hot outside

Japan's never-ending summer continues

Who knew “Evangelion” was a documentary?

A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about how climate change is affecting Japanese culture in unexpected ways, from styles and fashions to traditions and even the language itself, as poetic kigo phrases fall out of synch with the seasons.

Now The New York Times has posted another example of how rising temperatures are hitting Japan where it really hurts: in the rice paddies. “The Quest to Save the ‘King’ of Japanese Rice From Rising Temperatures” (gift link) explores how heat is impacting the yields of Japan’s most popular strain of rice, koshi-hikari. Harvest time is September, so when I wrote my essay last August, we couldn’t have known that 2023 would be a very bad year for koshi-hikari — and that it would contribute to a brief rice shortage this year.

The problems aren’t limited to rice. “Sunburn” is killing harvests of nashi, Asian pears. Lobster catches are plunging due to rising sea temperatures. Sardines and mackerel, favorite autumn foods, are growing smaller every year. Several municipalities in Hokkaido were forced to cancel early kelp harvests this year due to insufficient amounts of the seaweed off their coasts. And even where there aren’t problems, things are going topsy-turvy. Satsuma imo sweet potatoes, so named for their association with the subtropical island of Kyushu, can now be cultivated in Hokkaido. Previously, the furthest north they’d been farmed was Fukushima. And scientists are saying Tokyo Bay will be filled with tropical corals by the mid-2030s.

When I stepped out of my house this mid-October morning in Tokyo, the thermometer read 27 degrees C, 80 F — which is more like the average temperature for a given June. I first moved to Tokyo in 2003. Back then, the seasons felt as predictable as clockwork: the coming of the monsoon in late June; the spike in temperatures thereafter; the sweaty doldrums of August; the heat breaking like a fever in early September, and the long, slow slide into winter.

That hasn’t been the case for quite some time now. Tokyo’s summer weather regularly persists deep into September; now it seems to be making a push into October. Unseasonably warm days have always happened on occasion, but the occasion now seems to be “all the time.” This isn’t idle grousing; you can see a list of historic temperatures for Tokyo on the Japan Meterological Agency’s website, which shows just how relentlessly the averages are rising across the board.

I see signs of it everywhere: summer bugs still flying; the fact it’s mid-October and I still haven’t packed away my shorts; how my wife, who is a certified kimono fitter, has to wear summer-weight fabrics beyond the seasons which tradition dictates. The government’s heatstroke alert announcement system was only turned off this week; the 1700+ alerts this year set a new record.

Photo by Johan Brooks, for the Japan Times

The journalists Tim Hornyak and Alex K.T. Martin have filed some really interesting stories on the way Japanese spiritual leaders are dealing with climate change. In July, Alex wrote in the Japan Times about the ressurection of a centuries-old Buddhist ritual to change weather patterns. And in August, Tim wrote about a Shinto shrine in Koenji, Tokyo, dedicated to venerating the kami of weather.

So there you have it: an update on how climate is affecting Japan, a year after my last report. On the positive side, perhaps the ongoing efforts of these holy spots are working, because the forecast predicts temperatures are set to decline, grudgingly (?), over the next few days. But I can now officially say that the answer to those who ask me what to pack for autumn visits to Japan is a resounding “I don’t know.”