Ōfunato Wildfire
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Ōfunato Wildfire
On 26 February 2025, a wildfire began in the southeast of Ōfunato, a city in the Iwate Prefecture of Japan. The fire grew to cover before it was extinguished on 9 March, making it the largest wildfire in Japan in over 50 years. It destroyed 171 structures, killed one person, and forced over 4,500 people to evacuate. Background Antecedent conditions Japan had its hottest year on record in 2024. The fire started during Ōfunato's dry season, which runs from January to March. The city had seen the least amount of rainfall in February on record with just , compared to the average of , breaking the previous record of set in 1967. Yusuke Yokoyama, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, attributed the dry conditions to cold, dry air clashing with moist air from the sea. Yokoyama also mentioned that the fire's quick spread could be due to the topography of the steep mountains where the fire was spreading. Yoshiya Touge, a professor of w ...
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Ōfunato
is a city located in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 35,452, and a population density of 110 persons per km2 in 14,895 households. The total area of the city is . Geography Ōfunato is located in southeastern Iwate Prefecture, with the Pacific Ocean to the east. Outside its bay, the warm and cold ocean currents meet, which allow a commercial fishing industry to flourish. The city has been attempting to establish itself as a major shipping port. Kaminari-iwa on the city's Goishi coastline has been designated one of the 100 Soundscapes of Japan by the Ministry of the Environment. Much of the city is within the borders of the Sanriku Fukkō National Park. Neighbouring municipalities Iwate Prefecture * Kamaishi * Rikuzentakata * Sumita Climate Ōfunato has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification ''Cfa'') with hot summers and cold winters. The average annual temperature in Ōfunato is 11.7 °C. The average annual r ...
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ...
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Japan Self-Defense Forces
The are the military forces of Japan. Established in 1954, the JSDF comprises the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, and the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. They are controlled by the Ministry of Defense with the Prime Minister as commander-in-chief. Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly into the 21st century, increased tensions with North Korea, China, and Russia have reignited debate over the status of the JSDF and their relationship to Japanese society. The JSDF have prioritized greater cooperation and partnership with Australia, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States, and NATO, as well as acquiring new equipment and hardware. History Establishment Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers on 15 August 1945, and officially exchanged instruments of surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September, after which Japan underwent a U.S.-led military occupation for seven years, until 28 April 1952. ...
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Yomiuri Shimbun
The is a Japanese newspaper published in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Fukuoka, Fukuoka, and other major Japanese cities. It is one of the five major newspapers in Japan; the other four are ''The Asahi Shimbun'', the ''Chunichi Shimbun'', the ''Mainichi Shimbun'', and the ''The Nikkei, Nihon Keizai Shimbun''. It is headquartered in Ōtemachi, Otemachi, Chiyoda, Tokyo.'' It is a newspaper that represents Tokyo and generally has a Conservatism, conservative orientation. It is one of Japan's leading newspapers, along with the Osaka-based Liberalism, liberal (Third Way) ''Asahi Shimbun'' and the Nagoya-based Social democracy, social democratic ''Chunichi Shimbun''. This newspaper is well known for its pro-American stance among major Japanese media. It is published by regional bureaus, all of them subsidiaries of #Yomiuri Group, The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, Japan's largest media conglomerate by revenue and the second largest media conglomerate by size behind Sony,The Yomiuri Shimbun H ...
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, also known by its romanized initialism NHK, is a Japanese public broadcaster. It is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee. NHK operates two terrestrial television channels (NHK General TV and NHK Educational TV), three satellite television channels (NHK BS; as well as two ultra-high-definition television channels, NHK BS Premium 4K and NHK BS8K), and three radio networks (NHK Radio 1, NHK Radio 2, and NHK FM). NHK also provides an international broadcasting service, known as NHK World-Japan. NHK World-Japan is composed of NHK World TV, NHK World Premium, and the shortwave radio service Radio Japan (RJ). World Radio Japan also makes some of its programs available on the Internet. NHK was the first broadcaster in the world to broadcast in high-definition (using multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding, also known as Hi-Vision) and in 8K. History NHK's earliest forerunner was the , founded in 1924 under the leadership of Count Got ...
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The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only the online edition. The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. ''The Independent'' won the Brand of the Year Award in The Drum Awards for Online Media 2023. History 1980s Launched in 1986, the first issue of ''The Independent'' was published on 7 October in broadsheet format.Dennis Griffiths (ed.) ''The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992'', London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 330. It was produced by Newspaper Publishing plc and created by Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. All three partners were former journalists at ''The Daily Telegraph'' who had left the paper towards the end of Lord Hartwell' ...
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Aerial Firefighting
Aerial firefighting, also known as waterbombing, is the use of aircraft and other aerial resources to Wildfire suppression, combat wildfires. The types of aircraft used include fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Smokejumpers and rappellers are also classified as aerial firefighters, delivered to the fire by parachute from a variety of fixed-wing aircraft, or rappelling from helicopters. Chemicals used to fight fires may include water, water enhancers such as Fire-fighting foam, foams and Fire-retardant gel, gels, and specially formulated fire retardants such as Phos-Chek. Terminology The idea of fighting forest fires from the air dates back at least as far as Friedrich Karl von Koenig-Warthausen's observations on seeing a blaze when overflying the Santa Lucia Range, California, in 1929. A wide variety of terminology has been used in the popular media for the aircraft (and methods) used in aerial firefighting. The terms airtanker or air tanker generally refer to fixed-wing air ...
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''Japan Today'' is a website that publishes wire articles, press releases, and photographs, as well as opinion and contract pieces, such as company profiles, in English. References External links * 2000 establishments in Japan English-language newspapers published in Japan Newspapers published in Tokyo Newspapers established in 2000 {{Japan-newspaper-stub ...
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Japan Fires In Ofunato Now Tmo 20250301
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea in the south. The Japanese archipelago consists of four major islands—Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu—and thousands of smaller islands, covering . Japan has a population of over 123 million as of 2025, making it the eleventh-most populous country. The capital of Japan and its largest city is Tokyo; the Greater Tokyo Area is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37 million inhabitants as of 2024. Japan is divided into 47 administrative prefectures and eight traditional regions. About three-quarters of the country's terrain is mountainous and heavily forested, concentrating its agriculture and highly urbanized population along its eastern coastal plains. The country sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, ...
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