Category: Various

It’s 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and near 90% humidity in Tokyo, it’s very hot! To cool off every Summer we have the “luck” to receive something known as “guerrilla rainstorms” ゲリラ豪雨, which are localized heavy rainstorms that come and go very quickly.

The novelty this year is that we are having “guerrilla hailstorms”. These are some photos and a video of a “guerrilla hailstorm” in Mitaka and Kichijoji 15 days ago.

It’s impressive to see white streets at this time of the year. However this Summer hail in Tokyo can’t compete at all with the following Summer hailstorm in Russia!:

Japanese giant salamanders (Ōsanshōuo) are the second largest species of salamander around the world (after the Chinese ones). They are as large as 1.5 meters (5 feet) long. Last week one of them was spotted near the shore of Kamogawa river in Kyoto. These type of salamanders are not dangerous at all but police decided to pick it up and give it a ride out of civilization taking it to the mountains to the north of Kyoto.

Giant salamander in an Ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

More details about giant salamanders in the Wikipedia article.

Wandering around Wikipedia I ended up reading an article about Katia and Marice Krafft, a couple of French volcanologists that after several decades filming volcano eruptions around the world, they eventually died in the eruption of Mount Unzen (Nagasaki) in 1991. Unzen is one of the most active volcanoes in Japan. Legend has it that an eruption in the 18th century killed 15,000 people. Its most recent eruptions were in 1990, 1991 and 1995.

Unzen volcano from the sea

Katia and Marice are considered pioneers in photographing and recording video eruptions. In 1991 they arrived to Japan with a National Geographic team. The day before dying Marice said in front of the camera:

“I am never afraid because I have seen so much eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don’t care”

In this video, starting at second 20 Marice “predicts” his destiny and starting at minute 1 you can see the devastating eruption and the pyroclastic flow that ended their lives.