‘KOKUSHOBI’:
Japan has recorded its first-ever ‘cruelly hot day,’ a new category introduced this year by the Japan Meteorological Agency for temperatures above 40°C
In a potato field in Yanggu County, 130km northeast of Seoul, Lee Sang-hyuk dug into the soil and found nothing worth saving. A week earlier the crop, in Gangwon Province, had looked fine. Now the potatoes came up soft and collapsing, “like boiled potatoes,” spoiled by heat that had turned the ground into something closer to an oven. “It’s not just one or two fields like this. How can I even put it into words? It’s so upsetting,” he told local Seoul Broadcasting System.
People cool off at a misting station at a park in Seoul yesterday.
His ruined harvest is one thread in a punishing summer across east Asia, as record heat swept through South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong in the past few weeks. On Aug. 2, the southeastern city of Yangsan recorded a temperature of 42.5°C, the highest registered in South Korea since modern weather observations began in 1904.
