According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, this was Japan’s hottest summer in the past 113 years.
From June to August, temperatures rose by 1.64 degrees Celsius higher than average, and the highest since 1898 when the weather agency started recording data.
Central Tokyo has seen 48 “tropical nights” with the lowest temperature of 25°C (77°F) at night. The average temperature in Tokyo was 27.1°C (80.78°F) which is 2.3 degrees higher than average. These calculations do not include the heat island effect in urban areas and other phenomena.
According to the forecasts, the country can expect daytime high temperatures to stay around 35°C (95°F) at least until September 14.
Heatstroke has so far sent more than 40,000 people to hospitals and claimed hundreds of lives, mostly senior citizens.
They throw them into trash bins for plastic bottle caps, of course!
PET bottle caps trash bin. Found in Adachi-ku City Hall, Tokyo.
In Japan, recycling is part of daily life. Besides separating caps from plastic bottles, people usually remove the labels from bottles as well before dumping them into recycle bins.
There even exists a special organization — The Council for PET Bottle Recycling — established in 1993 for promotion, research and study of plastic bottle recycling.
A law for container and packaging recycling which also includes plastic bottles has been enforced in April 1997 by the Japan Ministry of the Environment.
This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These two and 200000+ others didn’t survive.
The incident brought an early end to the second world war and marked the beginning of more safer and a more peace-loving period, a true nuclear renaissance of humanity with yet more bombs, explosions and harmful psychopaths on the highest political positions.
A Japanese artist named Isao Hashimoto in 2003 released a video that shows all nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998 on the map of the world.
The ten-minute show kicks off with the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test bombing in the desert near Los Alamos in the US and concludes with a majestic series of Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998. In the beginning, the explosions are relatively rare, so if you want real action, fast-forward to 1962. Total number of detonations is 2053; the players are the United States, Russia/USSR, France, United Kingdom, China, India and Pakistan.
The digits in the upper right corner are month and year. The bottom right shows the total count of explosions.
A talented photographer and traveler Trey Ratcliff has created two very cool videos capturing daily life in Japan. Most scenes are from Tokyo, some from Kyoto. Watch them here:
Trey Ratcliff, who is blind on one eye, has a lot of really neat photos in HDR technique on his web site at StuckInCustoms.com (the Japan category is here).
A note for the technically inclined: the slow-motion footage in the above videos was achieved using a Casio EX-FC100 digital camera. This little gadget costs only about $200 and can capture up to 1000 frames per second.
What will Tokyo look like in a post-apocalyptic world with no humans, no politicians and no corporations? Japanese artist who calls himself Tokyo Genso (Tokyo Fantasy) has a frightening vision.
Let’s begin with a teleport to Shibuya, the location of a once world’s busiest pedestrian crossing. The famous Shibuya 109 still stands in the middle, but there will be no more shopping…
In the first street on the right — Shibuya Center Gai — we see the ruins of the electronic retailer Sakuraya…
…where everything is soon taken over by vegetation.
At Nakano station we wait for the train that never comes…
…and so we walk further to Shinjuku which surprisingly wasn’t affected much by the destruction…
Akihabara, once a mecca for everything digital, has been flooded by rivers. Palm trees grow atop electronics giant Sofmap.
Time stands still at Yoyogi Station.
And what about airports? Seems like there will be no more flights at Haneda.
Want to see more? Tokyo Genso has a gallery on DeviantArt. What’s really neat about these illustrations — besides the obvious great skill — is that all locations are real, with beautifully detailed buildings that you can see in today’s Tokyo.
September 3, 2010 by Rok | Miscellaneous | Add your comment »
According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, this was Japan’s hottest summer in the past 113 years.
