By the time I reached the middle of the sunflower field, my face had taken on an alarming shade of red. The sunflowers I’d come to see in Kiyose, some towering as much as 2 meters above me, were magnificent. Distinctly less magnificent was the fact I’d inadvertently chosen to visit them on Tokyo’s hottest day of the year so far.
The mercury had climbed to 38 degrees Celsius. I was dripping with sweat, darting between islands of shade and clutching an increasingly futile handheld fan, wondering how I’d managed to overheat while doing little more than standing in a field and admiring the view. Somehow, though, the people around me appeared to be having an entirely different experience.
An older woman ambled past in long trousers and sleeves that covered her wrists. Another couple posed for photos. An elderly gentleman tended to a vegetable patch nearby.
They weren’t exactly impervious to the heat — people clustered in the shade, covered up against the sun and waved electric fans in front of their faces — but nobody looked even remotely as close to melting as I felt. I had lived in Tokyo as a child, at a time when I could spend summer days running around outside without giving much thought to the heat. But returning 25 years later, I was beginning to wonder whether Tokyo’s summers had changed — or I had.
According to Kazutaka Oka, head of the Climate Change Impacts Monitoring Research Section at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tokyo’s average temperature has risen by about 3 C over the past century. One of those degrees can be attributed to climate change, with the other two linked to the urban heat island effect, he says. Concrete and asphalt absorb the sun’s heat during the day and release it slowly, while buildings, traffic and air-conditioning systems pump more warmth into the surrounding air.
It’s an irony that isn’t lost on Oka. As temperatures rise, we retreat indoors and turn on the air conditioning, which in turn releases heat outside: “It’s a negative spiral,” he says. Where once temperatures above 40 degrees were rare in Japan, they’re becoming increasingly common.
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