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  • Jay Tee

Japanese Summer Weather

There is no need to panic due to the bad information being shared about extreme weather near Japan. (And I've been blocking other local people intentionally doing this!)


I DO recommend to Japanese visitors that (if you can) avoiding summer outright is best. Japan is an awesome place to visit... September through May. Summer in Japan starts with our "rainy season" (about three weeks of daily rain, usually in June), followed by hot weather and the chance of typhoons the rest of the season.


But... Typhoons/Cyclones/Hurricanes rapidly decay in a matter of hours once the center hits a significant landmass. Within a day, they turn into a few nasty rainstorms and then those disperse over the next couple days.


How to tell if they're dangerous to you: Look primarily at the WIND SPEEDS (sustained and gust speeds are shown on the site linked below). If they're under 70 knots sustained wind speeds, the typhoon is no longer a "hurricane," but merely a "tropical storm" by US weather service standards. These can cause severe localized flooding, but typically cause only minor disruption to travel.


Follow all current typhoon tracks and predictions in English, right here: https://www.jma.go.jp/bosai/map.html#5/35.422/136.078/&elem=root&typhoon=all&contents=typhoon&lang=en


Now, this looked like a fairly nasty typhoon just as the center passed over land. See the small red circle? That is the dangerous wind zone. Yellow circle means quite breezy and annoying, perhaps, but mostly not dangerous. So a good chunk of the country was (briefly) affected.

In the next image showing less than 24 hours later, our supposedly "huge" "powerful" "dangerous" and "record-breaking" typhoon was already well and truly shattered. At no point are wind speeds higher than 30 knots—less than HALF the speed at which a storm is classified as a cyclone or hurricane. The storm itself is beginning to lose organization and spread out. This means individual parts are becoming isolated, individual rain showers of only moderate intensity. They will continue to cause localized minor flooding, but little danger.


Hope that helps!



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