In G7 host Hiroshima, a climate disaster in all but name. By Joel Tansey

In G7 host Hiroshima, a climate disaster in all but name

BY JOEL TANSEY

STAFF WRITER

May 7, 2023

As the leaders of the world’s leading rich nations meet in Hiroshima with the twin crises of energy security and climate change looming large, they won’t need to look far for an example of how a warming planet’s effects are already wreaking havoc on even the wealthiest economies.

Hiroshima Prefecture, the capital of which will host the Group of Seven leaders from May 19 to 21, was one of the hardest-hit areas of Japan when torrential rain engulfed a large swath of the country in the summer of 2018, causing flooding, landslides, debris flow and erosion that left over 230 dead and cost ¥1.16 trillion (about $10 billion at the time), or roughly 2.6% of the country’s nominal gross domestic product in 2018.

The rain disaster was immediately followed by a calamity of another sort: a deadly heat wave, with temperatures in Celsius soaring into the upper 30s in many parts of the country and even into the low 40s in some areas.

With the G7 representing seven of the top 21 carbon emitters in 2021 and historically having contributed an even larger share of planet-warming greenhouse gases, the more vulnerable nations in the “Global South” — from flood-ravaged Pakistan to countries like the Marshall Islands, whose very existence is at stake — will be looking for the wealthy nations to provide leadership on climate change.

But the uneven climate record of host Japan — seen as largely responsible for the failure to agree on a phaseout of coal at the G7 environment ministers meeting in Sapporo last month — should stop them from setting their hopes too high, with its policies emerging from a context of political and public reluctance to fully recognize how global warming is already wreaking havoc on Japanese cities.

In fact, Hiroshima itself serves as a reminder that climate change — like the COVID-19 pandemic — doesn’t recognize national borders and even the world’s richest nations won’t be able to spend their way out of climate-linked disasters.

And Japan, despite recent destruction brought by floods, heat waves, landslides and typhoons, may need that reminder more than most: While the effects of climate change have created anxiety in many corners of the world, surveys show that Japanese are curiously far less concerned about warming than citizens of other nations, and the country’s much-criticized climate policies appear to bear that out.

‘Stronger and stronger’

Yoko Iwamoto, an associate professor at Hiroshima University, recalls working late on a Friday night in July 2018 when an alarm went off on her smartphone.

The downpour that had been falling on the school’s main campus in mountainous Higashihiroshima, part of an extended period of heavy rain resulting from a stationary seasonal front across much of Japan — and enhanced by a typhoon that swept through the Tsushima Strait — was turning into something more dangerous.

“The rain was becoming stronger and stronger,” Iwamoto says. “I felt very scared, so I decided to go home.”

She trekked through a parking lot that by then was “almost a pond” and managed to drive home.

Iwamoto, whose research focuses on oceans and the atmosphere and how climate change is impacting both, considers herself lucky. While her home was undamaged, residents of an adjacent district were not so fortunate. Her brother’s family, living in neighboring Kure, was without water services for two weeks, just as a deadly heat wave arrived that a study by the Meteorological Research Institute (MRI) later showed could not have happened without human-caused warming.

Altogether, 1,243 landslides occurred in Hiroshima Prefecture in 2018 — many of them in Higashihiroshima — more than the annual average for the entire country through 2017, according to land ministry data.

Across the country from June 28 to July 8, 24-hour rainfall records were broken at 77 weather stations out of 1,300, 48-hour records at 125 stations and 72-hour records at 123 stations, according to a 2018 report by the land ministry.

Other instances of record-breaking rains have struck Japan in recent years, triggering landslides and floods that have left a trail of death and destruction: Sixty-five dead in Kumamoto Prefecture in 2020 and over two dozen dead in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, a year later.

Scientists say torrential rain disasters are both becoming more severe and occurring more frequently as the planet warms.

Hiroaki Kawase, a senior researcher with the MRI’s Department of Applied Meteorology Research, says that, based on 1 degree Celsius of warming since preindustrial times, the 2018 rains were 6% to 7% more severe and three times more likely to occur. That’s because warmer air can hold more water vapor, leading to more precipitation, raising the key question of how high that percentage might go if the world doesn’t curb emissions.

And that’s particularly concerning for a country like Japan given its geography.

“Japan is located in the mid latitude and is (surrounded) by the ocean, so there is a lot of moisture from the south tropics, and then we have … many mountains which cause heavy rainfall,” Kawase says. “This causes a lot of river discharge and sometimes leads to flooding.”

Vulnerable land

Flooding, however, is only one side of the issue.

The 2018 disaster was particularly damaging because of the number of landslides triggered by the heavy rains.

Here, too, the makeup of the Japanese archipelago makes the country vulnerable, and that goes beyond the simple fact that large numbers of people live on or near steep slopes.

“One of the reasons for the increasing risk of landslides is the geology,” says Shuji Moriguchi, an associate professor at Tohoku University’s International Research Institute of Disaster Science and an expert on slope disasters.

Temporary housing in Saka, Hiroshima Prefecture, in January 2020 for people affected by the torrential rain that struck wide areas of western Japan in July 2018. A total of about 6,600 people in Hiroshima, Okayama and Ehime prefectures were still living in temporary housing in December 2019. | KYODO

Temporary housing in Saka, Hiroshima Prefecture, in January 2020 for people affected by the torrential rain that struck wide areas of western Japan in July 2018. A total of about 6,600 people in Hiroshima, Okayama and Ehime prefectures were still living in temporary housing in December 2019. | KYODO

Large areas of Japan, particularly in the west, are covered with a weak layer of granite soil, Moriguchi explains, with hard bedrock lying underneath.

“Granite soil is a very problematic soil and it has a very high risk of landslide,” he adds, noting that this was believed to be the culprit for many of the landslides that hit Hiroshima Prefecture in 2018.

The landslides are made worse because that solid granite rock underneath the weaker soil layer can also come down during a landslide.

“In that case, the debris flow should have a very high energy and impact,” Moriguchi says.

His latest research focuses on projections for when mountainsides might give way. While the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) already produces real-time landslide hazard maps, the data isn’t granular enough to warn residents of homes on individual slopes of impending danger. Moriguchi hopes to change that and eventually give people precise alerts telling them when it’s time to evacuate.

Whether they choose to do so is another matter.

One of the factors behind the high death toll in the 2018 floods was a failure by residents to evacuate safely. For some, the country’s warning system activated too late at night or wasn’t clear enough (The JMA revamped its warning system a year after the disaster, with the most severe level urging people to do whatever it takes to save one’s own life.) For others, particularly the elderly, evacuating in treacherous conditions wasn’t a realistic option.

But some simply chose to stay put, perhaps believing that the storm would pass without major incident or that their home offered them all the protection they needed.

“From researchers’ perspectives, we have to develop science. For me that’s the prediction method,” Moriguchi says. “One more important point is to change people’s minds (toward) evacuation.

“I think this is the most important thing, but it’s a really difficult problem.”

Mild concern

With Japan having experienced deadly torrential rain disasters and heat waves made worse by climate change — and that’s to say nothing of powerful typhoons that are also exacerbated by warming — one might expect the population to be anxious about what will happen in a world that’s even hotter than it is now.

Surveys, however, reveal only a mild level of concern.

A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that only 26% of Japanese respondents were “very” concerned about how climate change would affect them personally, down 8 percentage points from the previous survey in 2015, making Japan the only nation among 16 advanced economies polled to show a significant decline.

For some G7 peers, the share of those who are very concerned shot up significantly: by 19 points to reach 37% in Germany and 18 points in the U.K. to also hit 37%. While Japan’s 26% share placed it last in the G7, the country did nonetheless have the highest share of people who said they were “somewhat” concerned about climate change.

A volunteer washes his face amid a heat wave during clean-up work on July 18, 2018, in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, a city heavily damaged by floods following torrential rains that hit western Japan. | KYODO 

A volunteer washes his face amid a heat wave during clean-up work on July 18, 2018, in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, a city heavily damaged by floods following torrential rains that hit western Japan. | KYODO

A 2022 survey by Ipsos Global Advisor showed similar results, with just 34% of Japanese answering they had worried “a great deal” about climate change over the past two to three weeks, compared with the global average of 48%. Only the Netherlands, Russia and China had a lower rate.

One study, by Yale University in 2022, did put the level of Japanese respondents’ concerns in line or even beyond those in other developed nations. But even then, compared with other Asia-Pacific economies, a lower share of Japanese respondents expected global warming to be personally harmful: A total of 33% of respondents felt they would experience “a great deal” of harm due to climate change, while 43% expected “a moderate amount.”

Yasuko Kameyama, a professor with the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Frontier Sciences and a senior researcher with the state-run National Institute of Environmental Studies, believes the lack of concern among many Japanese comes in part from how disasters are reported by major media outlets.

The Yale study would seem to bear that out. The survey showed that only 21% of people in Japan reported hearing about climate change at least once a week, compared with 48% and 41% in Canada and the United States, respectively, at least 50% in France, Australia and the U.K., and over 60% in Germany and Sweden.

“Japanese people know as a part of education and a part of basic learning that (carbon dioxide) will warm up the world, and everybody has heard of global warming or climate change. They know it’s there,” Kameyama says.

“Newspapers or TV news, whenever they explain the extreme weather events they do not explain the (links) between such extreme weather events and climate change, and I think that has really affected people’s understanding or misunderstanding of climate change in Japan.”

But in a democracy with a highly educated population, it’s perhaps nonetheless fair to point the finger at the public for not demanding more from their elected leaders.

The study by Yale showed that just 17% of Japanese believe climate should be a “very high” priority for the government, last in the G7 by 12 percentage points.

“Whenever I have a chance to talk with people who are aware of climate change and who are worried about climate change, they tend to ask me, ‘What can we do to save the climate?’” Kameyama says. “So I recommended them to reach out to other people and try to convey messages that they are worried about climate change. And that’s the only way to change the mindset of political leaders, even at a local level.”

Indeed, Kameyama also contrasted the way Japanese leaders speak about disasters compared with their counterparts in other countries.

When U.S. President Joe Biden visited California in January after deadly storms lashed parts of the typically dry state, he opened his remarks by saying, “If anybody doubts that climate is changing, then they must have been asleep for the last couple of years.”

In his remarks during his visit to western Japan in the aftermath of the 2018 floods, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe didn’t mention climate change at all, although he did refer to the link between the disaster and climate later that year — albeit in an English-language op-ed for the Financial Times. Other top lawmakers have referred to the link between recent disasters and climate change — including Fumio Kishida before he became prime minister — but not as forcefully as Western leaders and in government meetings where the messaging might not be as impactful.

“Whenever there is a flood or extreme weather events in his or her own country, (other G7 leaders) will go to the place and they will talk about climate change,” Kameyama says. “And everybody’s watching (them) talk about or relate the loss and damage to climate change.

“In Japan, we never see that happen.”