RetireJapan

When I started my car yesterday, it reported that the collision detect feature was disabled due to the outside sensor overheating.. (my car park is non covered, and there is no shade)
When we arrived at KONAN, most people were trying to park in the covered parking as opposed to the non-covered roof parking.
At the rate the summers are getting hotter each year here, can we even retire in Japan? At this rate even 10 years out is a concern...

Just a suspicion, but in the summer heat I think my mileage goes down--some of the gas may be evaporating?

captainspoke wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 2:11 am Just a suspicion, but in the summer heat I think my mileage goes down--some of the gas may be evaporating?

The Car Aircon puts extra load on the engine, and burns additional gas, so this is expected.

concerned wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 12:09 am At the rate the summers are getting hotter each year here, can we even retire in Japan? At this rate even 10 years out is a concern...

It is noticeably hotter now than it was when I got here 23 years ago. It is going to get much hotter in our lifetimes. We are going to see more flooding, more snow, more heavy rain, more heatwaves.

I fear we are going to see global food shortages and massive refugee relocations.

Personally I think Japan is going to weather this better than many places. Europe seems far worse off at the moment, with homes unsuited to heat and limited air conditioning, brutal heatwaves (48 degrees???), and less organised government and social responses.

We intend to live in my wife's parents' place eventually. It is next to a forest and much cooler than the area around our manshon, despite just being about 6km away. I also plan to make it as resilient as possible (solar panels, growing vegetables, catching rainwater for garden and emergency use).

It's going to suck, but it's going to suck a lot less if you plan for it and prepare a bit.

concerned wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 12:09 am When I started my car yesterday, it reported that the collision detect feature was disabled due to the outside sensor overheating.. (my car park is non covered, and there is no shade)
When we arrived at KONAN, most people were trying to park in the covered parking as opposed to the non-covered roof parking.
At the rate the summers are getting hotter each year here, can we even retire in Japan? At this rate even 10 years out is a concern...

Very on brand comment by "Concerned"..

Tokyoite checking in.
On Saturday I stupidly (I do everything stupidly as not to surprise my family) cycled 125km out to the hills on some smaller roads and 林道.
It was shady and "cool". By which I mean maybe 26/27?
This morning I was out at 5am. Coming back at 7:30am knew it was already over 30 degs (It's been 37 since lunchtime.).

I do wonder about what happens when night time temp doesn't drop below 30. Just how high can the day time temp might go..
It feels like there is an exponential element to this in Tokyo. As the streets are lined with buildings and the cars provide a 'fan assisted oven' type effect where we are the main course!

Personally, I've basically decided to ignore the weather. I went for a 5km run at 31degs the other evening much to my wife's chagrin (Speaking of her 'chagrin' I'm not sure what one is or where she keeps it, but based on my behaviour these past 25 years I suspect it must be a splendid example.).
Anyway, once my eyeballs stopped sweating, the app thing kindly informed me it "felt like 34".
I'm not sure if the bright spark that wrote that bit of code thinks they're helping or not. I'd rather not know. It's too late at the end anyway. Although it may assist a coroner I suppose.

oh! We got one of those umbrella style windscreen covers.
Highly recommend. Total game changer. Greta can pack her bags and come home as far as I'm concerned.(To be clear. That means I'm not concerned. I'm stupid..).

I'm now going to google "House sized reflective parasol"..

I watched Al Gore in person launch the European premier of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. I was quite taken aback, it affected my personal and political choices since. However, for the next 17 years watched society largely ignore the problem, and the climate deniers get pretty vocal. Although as the effects have started to hit in the last few years, they seem to have quietened down, at least.

adamu wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 4:57 am the climate deniers get pretty vocal. Although as the effects have started to hit in the last few years, they seem to have quietened down, at least.

Yeah, quietly making things worse: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ossil-fuel

I'm so disappointed. Inconvenient Truth seemed like a watershed, but since then... effectively crickets. The only government seemingly taking it seriously is China

Note the part in yellow:
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/evaporat ... 20outside.

concerned wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 12:09 am When I started my car yesterday, it reported that the collision detect feature was disabled due to the outside sensor overheating.. (my car park is non covered, and there is no shade)

First world problems methinks! I didn't even know what a collision avoidance system was until I rented a car in the US a few years ago and I kept hearing strange beeps every time I got too close to the concrete "Jersey" barriers on the freeway. Honestly, I'm much happier to be riding the air conditioned trains in Japan than to be stuck in traffic listening to beeps. I even put that in my PR "statement of reason" that I love living in Japan due to the train system... well, that and the washlets.

As for the current heatwave in Japan due to the entirely natural Super El Nino, I'm outside enjoying every minute of it! I was at a river barbecue yesterday outside of Tokyo with a group of friends and their families. The kids all had a blast exploring the river and checking out the "akachan sakana" near a cool old concrete dam. It was a perfectly beautiful, hot sunny day and I got a bit sunburned but nothing serious.

Today I will go for a run when the sun goes down and work off some of those extra calories from the barbecue. Then on Wednesday I'm off to Mount Fuji with a group of friends for another all night summit climb. Unfortunately, it looks like showers on Weds/Thu but I'm always up for the challenge. I'm more worried about the potential for lightening to be honest.

Moneymatters wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 4:11 am I do wonder about what happens when night time temp doesn't drop below 30. Just how high can the day time temp might go..
It feels like there is an exponential element to this in Tokyo. As the streets are lined with buildings and the cars provide a 'fan assisted oven' type effect where we are the main course!

That is a very astute observation as most of the warming in Tokyo over the past hundred years has been due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. That's a consequence of the fact that concrete/asphalt retains heat which makes nights feel warmers and days feel more like an inferno in peak summer months.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has the gold standard of Japanese historical temperature datasets. Compare the average annual temps in Tokyo which have risen a couple of degrees over the past hundred years to that of Hachijojima, an island 300km south of Tokyo, entirely unaffected by the UHI. Statistically, the temperature record in Hachijojima has been flat over the same hundred years. We see the same effects in other urban areas of Japan where cities are a couple degrees warmer (on average) due to UHI than the surrounding countryside.

I’ve been thinking about the personal effects of climate change more and more each year as we’re getting an increasing number of floods, heatwaves, etc. across the country.

We hope to move out of Tokyo in the next 2 to 3 years and I’m wondering what parts of the country will most likely be more resilient in terms of climate change (both extreme heat and other extreme weather events).

Has anyone seen a more localized climate change prediction map just for Japan?