On the afternoon of 28 July 2026, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto Prefecture in south-western Japan, reaching the top of our seismic intensity scale in the towns of Uki and Hikawa. Buildings have collapsed, lives have been lost, and strong aftershocks are continuing as I write. My thoughts are with everyone affected.
The official relief funds here are domestic accounts, with no published route for donations from abroad. If you would like to help from outside Japan, the simplest course is to contact your own national Red Cross or Red Crescent society — and donations made at home are often tax deductible, where they might not be here.
Thank you for reading.
Information correct as of 29 July 2026.
We’re having another impossible summer here in Japan. I hope you’re all keeping well.
This corner of the internet is a deep mountain valley: no sunlight, no crowds. Which ought to make it fairly cool in here, I think? Do come in and rest a while.
So. These days I go out wearing a straw hat pulled low over my eyes, a linen hand towel and a cooling scarf slung round my neck, and a parasol over the lot. I would very much like to look elegant while doing this. I do not.
But this is the summer in which our Meteorological Agency introduced a brand-new word — kokushobi, an “extreme heat day”, meaning 40°C or above — and I’ve decided that vanity can wait. Heatstroke can’t.
A few days ago I ended up with a great heap of cardboard to get rid of. In my area, cardboard is only collected once a month, and I wasn’t prepared to live in a room full of the stuff until then, so I walked it to the supermarket recycling point myself. Fifteen minutes each way, three round trips a day, for five days.
Afterwards, for about two days, I had the strangest sensation of heat trapped somewhere inside my body, and I began to wonder whether I had finally managed to give myself heatstroke. Fluids and a cooling gel patch settled it in the end — though what I should have had in the cupboard, and didn’t, was oral rehydration solution.
Further reading: Heat exhaustion and heatstroke
The boxes were large enough that both my hands were full, so the parasol stayed at home. I had the hat, at least. But a parasol turns out to be one of those things you only properly appreciate in its absence.
And, well. There is also the small matter of my choosing to walk about in the two o’clock sun. Lesson learnt.
If you really must go out in the middle of the day, it might be worth planning your route around the air conditioning — a convenience store here, a library there — and working your way to your destination in stages.
Still, I suppose a summer like this one is going to push a great many people into taking an interest in the environment, whether they meant to or not.
I’ve only just started reading up on it myself. The other day I switched on the radio and found Sunday Debate — a current affairs discussion programme on NHK, our public broadcaster — and the topic happened to be the heat, so for once I stayed and listened properly.
One of the experts said that Japan is among the countries most exposed to the effects of global warming, and that the climate here is likely to become subtropical. Our four seasons, he said, will collapse into two.
He went on: there are projections for how the temperature will rise from here, but they are only projections — and the real figures will very likely exceed them.
Spring and autumn have already thinned to almost nothing in recent years. Being told that the reality is likely to outrun the forecasts made my blood run cold.
He also said that because Japan is surrounded by sea, it will never reach 50°C. Never. But I have to say that, as a listener, one does not respond to this with “oh, marvellous, never, what a relief!” The fact that the number fifty is being said out loud at all seems to me a very serious problem indeed.
Fifty degrees. That isn’t a climate. That’s a world without us in it.
…And yet the world at large seems remarkably relaxed about all this.
While I was carrying those boxes through the heat, I watched the cars going past and felt something close to resentment. There are still an awful lot of petrol cars out there, aren’t there?
My first thought was that we’ve surely reached the point where the law needs to be severe about it — ban petrol vehicles outright, make electric cars compulsory, and penalise anyone still driving the old sort.
So I put that to Claude (Opus 5), and got back something far more interesting than I’d expected, and learnt a great deal from it. I’ll be sharing that conversation here before long.
I’ve always felt that we are guests here — that the Earth is letting us stay.
Repaying that might be putting it too grandly. But I do find myself thinking, often, about whether there is anything I can do to lighten the load a little. And I believe that lightening it would save not only every other living thing, but us as well.
This quiet valley of mine only exists because the Earth is still well enough to hold it.
Notes for readers outside Japan
On the four seasons — In Japan the four seasons are not merely a fact of the calendar; they are something close to a shared aesthetic inheritance. Poetry here has been organised around them for well over a thousand years, and the year is still punctuated by cherry blossom in spring and red maple leaves in autumn. When a scientist says that four seasons will become two, he is describing a change in the weather. But a great many of us hear something else: the loss of the blossom, the loss of the maples, and the quiet disappearance of the things our poems were made of.
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