Tokyo
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For Yoko Toyoshima, winter has been getting colder lately.
“Maybe it’s because I’m older, but I feel like it snows more heavily than before,” she says.
During the warmer months, the 76-year-old’s small hometown in northern Japan seems like an ideal place to live, with its lush parks and historic shrines. Daisen’s famous summer fireworks display attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists.
But when winter arrives, everything changes.
“Living alone is fine during the summer, but it’s difficult in the winter because of the snow,” says Tojima.
In the past few months, there have been times when temperatures have been below freezing and snow has piled up “like a mountain” outside the doorsteps of Tojima Town. No matter how hard she tried to clear it, it kept coming back.
“There are days when you can’t do anything for a day or two, and it’s snowing,” she says. “I was worried about my safety. Recently, I started to feel like I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Her ordeal was difficult, but it could have been much worse.
This winter, record snowfall hit the northern region, including Toshima Ward’s home prefecture of Akita, killing at least 68 people (all but 10 of them over 65 years old). According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, most of the victims died while clearing snow.
The neighboring city of Aomori, on the tip of Honshu, received 1.7 meters of snow in February, the most in 40 years, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Japan’s aging population is a long-term problem, hampering economic growth and putting tremendous pressure on public finances.
But more directly, demographic changes mean that many isolated elderly people face life-threatening snowstorms alone. And, as Tojima suspected, the effects of climate change are making the storms even worse.
Satoko Minatoya, 66, who lives alone in Aomori, said she tried to use a service provided by the military to help elderly people clear snow during the winter. But the soldiers also seemed overwhelmed.
“I rang the helpline, but no one answered, and it must have been busy the whole time, so I finally gave up,” she said.
“I don’t have any relatives nearby, so I don’t have anyone to rely on. I’m trying to do it myself as much as possible.”
For decades, older people tended to stay in Japan’s rural areas while children migrated to big cities in search of better job opportunities. According to the 2020 census, the average age in the snowy northern prefecture is about 50 years old, five years older than the capital Tokyo.
Snow isn’t just a threat to your home.
Mr. Minatoya had a difficult time on the road when his car was covered in snow. Even after trying to remove all the snow for an hour, the top of the mountain was still impossible to reach.
“While I was driving, leftover snow slid down the windshield, blocking my view and almost causing a traffic accident,” she recalled.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost the physical and mental strength to deal with situations like this.”
Snow is not uncommon in northern Japan (an area as close to Russia’s Vladivostok as Tokyo), but climate change and warming ocean currents off the coast are making the weather increasingly unpredictable, experts told CNN.
“It’s like a snow bomb,” said Yoshihiro Tachibana, a climate professor at Mie University, comparing this year’s snowfall to an explosion.
He said rising temperatures are causing icebergs that have broken off from the North Pole to move towards Japan’s northern coast, bringing with them cold fog.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, as the winds change direction, Japan is also exposed to regular cold jet streams from Siberia.
However, just because it’s cold doesn’t mean it will snow. Completing the circle is that Japan’s oceans are warming, due in part to Japan’s increasingly hot summers, bringing excess water vapor to the region and causing heavy snowfall.
Tachibana warned, “Even worse heavy snowfall is likely to occur in the future.”
Tachibana said heavier, denser snow, brought on by the abundance of moisture in the air, increases the likelihood of catastrophic roof collapse.
“This type of disaster could happen more often,” he added.
This is a big problem for Hiroshi Sasaki (91), who lives alone in Yokote City, Akita Prefecture.
This troubled the widower so much that he called his eldest daughter, who works in Tokyo, several times over the past few months to discuss it. In the end, we asked a contractor to remove the snow.
But even if authorities offer to subsidize some of the costs, the fees remain too high for some people living on pensions.
Mr. Sasaki often went grocery shopping. But after experiencing a worrying fall last winter, he has had to reduce his grocery shopping to once a month.
“I slipped,” he told CNN, adding that he fell and suffered a concussion.
Her daughter comes home once a month and accompanies her shopping, each time purchasing a month’s worth of supplies.
The 90-year-old has tried to remain optimistic, occasionally joking about fall. “They all said I must be immortal,” he said.
According to Rikiya Matsukura, a researcher at Nihon University’s School of Economics, more than one-third of people over the age of 65 live alone in these northern prefectures.
“In highly aging regions, the same level of extreme weather events, whether it’s heavy snowfall or intense summer heat, can go from being an inconvenience to a threat to the very existence of living there,” he said.
He added that technological advances such as automatic snow removal and online medicine could improve life.
At a cabinet meeting last month, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi acknowledged that increasingly heavy snowfall was wreaking havoc on these aging and remote communities. The prime minister said, “We will take positive and forward-looking measures so that the people, who are burdened by the heavy snowfall, can return to their normal daily lives as soon as possible.”
Lately, Tojima’s shoulders and legs have become so weak that he can barely clear enough snow to walk out of the house. Sometimes my visiting grandchildren help me out.
But some people are not so lucky. “Many of my neighbors are elderly people who live alone, and there is no one to help shovel snow, so daily life is very difficult,” she says.
Every challenge raises one question. It’s a matter of whether you should move or not.
“This may require difficult but necessary decisions about which areas can realistically be sustained in the long term,” Nihon University’s Matsukura said. “In this sense, the challenge is not only how to support people on the ground, but also whether continued settlement itself is sustainable.”
But many seniors in these areas have strong ties to their communities, having ridden the same buses, visited the same bakeries, and picnicked in the same spots for decades. Many say it will be very difficult to readjust to a new life.
But Minatoya in Aomori has other concerns in mind. “Even if you call an emergency ambulance, it takes a long time to arrive in the winter. There are also snow removal costs and heating costs.”
A 59-year-old man living in Aomori Prefecture said, “I think I may be forced to move to an area without snow within a few years.”
However, Tojima, who has lived in Daisen for a similar period of time, wants to stay there because of the inseparable ties he has with his hometown.
“I was born and raised here, and I think every place has its own disasters,” she said, believing that after every heavy snowfall, there is always sunshine.
“It shall pass,” she said.
