- Reuters/Kyodo
- Trucks and cars are stranded in heavy snow on a road in Karuizawa in on Feb. 16.
At least 15 people died in the weekend’s record snowfall, with 1,600 injured, according to figures released by the Japan Meteorological Agency on Monday.
A wide region of eastern Japan, still reeling from the previous weekend’s heavy snowfall, was again buried under record inches of snow over the weekend. The bad weather disrupted distribution chains and stranded communities and vehicles as a low pressure front traveling northeast blanketed a wide area from west Japan to its northern Pacific coast.
The most heavily hit parts of the nation were inland areas surrounding the Tokyo metropolitan region. Yamanashi prefecture, west of Tokyo, was buried under the deepest snow on record for the area: 114 centimeters in the prefectural capital of Kofu.
The weather agency said cars and busloads of passengers were trapped overnight in tunnels in Yamanashi and Saitama.
Hundreds of households in villages spread across Yamanashi to western Tokyo remain buried under snow and cut off from lifelines, local media reported.
The snow-related deaths included a woman who appears to have died of exposure after apparently abandoning her car to get home on foot in Yamanashi, and at least two cases of carbon monoxide poisoning among people trapped in vehicles buried in snow in Gunma and Fukushima prefectures, according to Kyodo News.
The central government mobilized Self-Defense Force members to provide emergency rescue and material transport to heavily affected areas of Yamanashi, Gunma, Nagano, Shizuoka, Tokyo and Miyagi prefectures. According to the defense ministry, a total 19 aircraft were sent to Yamanashi alone, mostly UH-1 helicopters used for rescue operations.
Central Tokyo was also buried under 27 centimeters of snow, on par with last week’s heavy snowfall. Highway closures in snow-buried provincial areas pushed commercial trucks onto Tokyo’s streets, creating bumper-to-bumper traffic in the city’s main roads throughout the weekend.
Asked why the government didn’t issue a “special warning” ahead of the record breaking snowfall, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Monday that the agency didn’t foresee the snow accumulating for over a day.
“Special warnings are issued when we forecast a once-in-50-year mass of snow that is set to continue falling for a full day,” Mr. Suga said, in response to criticism that a higher level alert may have reduced the impact of the bad weather.
Online critics of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took the opportunity to attack him, after he was reported to have been dining at a Michelin-starred tempura restaurant Sunday evening with a group of supporters, while people were trapped in snow elsewhere in the nation. In Japan, the prime minister’s every move is logged and published by the national dailies.
“Dining with ‘supporters’ is fine, but shouldn’t there be other priorities at this time?” tweeted Daisuke Tsuda, a media activist with 282,000 followers.
But Mr. Abe’s supporters were quick to defend him.
“Don’t waste time criticizing PM Abe’s tempura—go shovel some snow yourself,” tweeted one.
“Sending Shinzo Abe to snow-struck Yamanashi would have been a bigger waste of tax money,” wrote another.