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Authorities in Japan have warned that the country’s biggest wildfire in decades is likely to spread, after it damaged dozens of homes and forced more than 1,000 people to flee.
Fires continued to rage a week after they broke out in the city of Ofunato, on the north-east coast, with weather officials speculating that this year’s unusually dry winter and strong winds were to blame.
As of Monday, the fire had spread through about 2,100 hectares of land, damaged 84 homes and forced 1,200 residents to take refuge in school gymnasiums and other shelters. A further 2,000 are staying with friends or relatives.
Local authorities believe that the blaze may have been responsible for the death of a man whose body was discovered on a road in the city late last week.
More than 2,000 self-defence force [SDF] troops and firefighters have struggled to control the flames as they spread through heavily forested mountainous areas bordering Ofunato, which was among communities destroyed in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
“The fire has significant force,” the city’s mayor, Kiyoshi Fuchigami, told reporters this week, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. “We are concerned that it will spread further.”
The prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, has vowed to deploy as many firefighters and SDF personnel as necessary in an attempt to limit the damage. “Although it is inevitable that the fire will spread to some extent, we will take all possible measures to ensure there will be no impact on people’s homes,” he told MPs.
Relief could be on the way, however. The meteorological agency said snow should start falling from early on Wednesday and turn into rain from around noon.
Four days after the fire started, aerial footage from the public broadcaster NHK showed the burned-out frames of buildings, and flames and thick white smoke rising from other structures in the worst-hit neighbourhoods of Ofunato, a city of about 40,000 people located 500 km north of Tokyo.
The wildfire is the biggest in Japan since the late 1980s, according to the fire and disaster management agency. Fires have broken out in other regions this winter, including mountainous Nagano prefecture, but have been brought under control, local media reported.
Regions in north-east Japan have experienced their driest winter since the meteorological agency began keeping records in 1946.
Ofunato saw just 2.5mm of rainfall throughout February, according to the meteorological agency – compared with an average of 41 mm for the same month in previous years.
“The weather conditions are dry, winds are strong, and the terrain is steep,” Yoshiya Touge, a professor of water resource research at Kyoto University, told the Japan Times. “And the trees, many of which are conifers, are highly flammable. These factors contribute to the fire spreading at a faster rate.”
The number of wildfires in Japan has declined since the peak in the 1970s, according to government data. But there were about 1,300 across the country in 2023, concentrated in the February to April period when the air dries and winds pick up.
