Originally Posted by alan11

I've been in Japan since the late 90s, and in the past, weather was just a fact of life and dealt with as it happened. But at some point starting about 10 years ago, weather warnings started to become increasingly more over-blown, uptight, and hyperbolic, to the point now that just the mere chance of a more-than-usual weather event is excessively reported non-stop in the media and makes the general public fraught with unnecessary anxiety.

In the smallish town where I live (for example) they now hedge against practically everything. Just the chance of moderate to heavy rain causes some of the narrow and curvy roads here to be fully closed to traffic well before any drop lands on the ground. A thunderstorm forecast with a heavy potential rain squall calls for landslide warnings and a evacuation announcement to seek shelter at the community centers (these announcements are done via public loudspeakers and in-house radio intercoms all residents were given a few years back). A normally hot day uses the same announcement systems warning everyone to stay indoors due to possible heat stroke. And if snow is forecast, 2 or 3 days beforehand we are advised (via the same indoor and outdoor speakers) to stock up like its an impending armageddon. Prior to 10 or so years ago, this never happened. I turned my house speaker to its lowest volume setting (it doesn't allow it to go to zero), but starting a couple years back, once a month they now do a full-on test warning, that pumps the volume up automatically with a thundering voice and a fog-horn alert (that would scare the bejesus out anyone) saying that its just a "system test". So as you can imagine, I've now just fully disconnected my house speaker.

The causes for this ever-increasing fear and excessiveness everywhere could be multi-fold, from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, to an increase in weather related accidents (or at least, an increase in reporting them), to government officials just looking to cover their butts if something bad does actually happen. And the media, particularly TV, loves doing this reporting since Japanese TV is so unwatchable otherwise. It finally gives them purpose it seems, with non-stop coverage of a guy outside with a hand-held mic and the obligatory helmet on, pretty much repeating the same info every 3 minutes. I don't own a TV actually, but I am currently at my in-laws place for Obon, and my wife's parents have been watching their TV intently, first about the non-stop reporting on the typhoon that crossed Tohoku earlier in the week, followed by the non-stop reporting of the typhoon that just brushed by Tokyo. Since they live in Tohoku I could kinda understand their interest in the first typhoon but they were well out of its anticipated forecast range, but even if they were not interested, pretty much every channel either had direct live coverage, or had alert announcements constantly scrolling across the bottom, top, and left side of the screen all day and night (and the left side alerts are announcing details for the Nankai Trough earthquake warning from last week... which is located on the opposite side of the country from here and completely out of effective range)

Its a bit sad to see people becoming programmed to be paranoid. I was just saying to my wife yesterday afternoon as we drove to the store here and the public loudspeakers along the way were blaring announcements to stay inside because of heatstroke (it was 32 degrees), how the current population of Japan has become rather frail, both physically and mentally, and if the conditions of WW2 were to happen again today, with the fire-bombings and rationing, the country would either immediately capitulate or just completely collapse.