SEOUL, July 27 (AJP) - South Korea joined the global survival game against extreme heat on Monday as temperatures neared 40 degrees Celsius after the monsoon fizzled out, emptying streets and farm fields alike.
Children and office workers, farmers and foreign tourists alike searched for clever ways to stay cool, crowding shopping malls, subway stations and other air-conditioned spaces.
By 3 p.m., the government raised the national heat crisis alert to "grave," its highest level, and activated the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters.
Behind the familiar summer scenes — umbrellas, handheld fans and iced drinks sweating in plastic cups — was a rapidly growing human toll.
As of Sunday, 1,399 people had been treated for heat-related illnesses in South Korea this summer, with eight presumed deaths. Emergency rooms admitted 72 patients on Sunday alone, including two women in their 80s and 90s who later died in Hadong and Gimje.
Daily emergency cases have risen sharply, from fewer than 20 on July 20 to 80 on July 25.
The figures also reveal that extreme heat is anything but socially equal.
More than 81 percent of patients became ill outdoors, with workplaces accounting for the largest share of cases. Manual laborers were the occupational group most frequently affected, while people aged 65 or older accounted for nearly one-third of all patients.
For office workers, a heat wave can mean an uncomfortable commute. For farmers, construction workers, delivery drivers and elderly people living alone, it can become a matter of survival.
Forecasters warned that the end of the rainy season allowed the North Pacific High and the Tibetan High to overlap above the Korean Peninsula, trapping hot air beneath a persistent dome of high pressure.
The climate pardons none. Across the sea, Japan has been experiencing weather so severe that it has had to invent a new word for it.
Japan's vocabulary for summer heat now resembles a meteorological staircase. A day above 25 C is a natsubi, or "summer day." Above 30 C comes a manatsubi, or "true summer day," followed by a moshobi, or "extremely hot day," once temperatures exceed 35 C.
This year, the Japan Meteorological Agency effectively added another step: kokushobi, commonly translated as a "cruelly hot" or "brutally hot" day, for temperatures of 40 C or higher.
Japan recorded its first official kokushobi on July 21. Gujo and Tajimi in Gifu Prefecture and Toyota in Aichi Prefecture all reached at least 40 C, with Toyota recording a local record of 40.1 C. Of Japan's 914 weather stations, 278 reported temperatures above 35 C that day.
By July 25, Japan had endured five consecutive days above 40 C, the longest such streak since comparable records began in 2010. Nearly 11,000 people sought emergency medical care for heat-related illnesses between July 13 and 19, and 14 were pronounced dead on arrival. In Tokyo alone, 453 people were hospitalized on July 23, the city's highest daily total since records began more than a decade ago.
Japan, famous for putting almost anything into a vending machine, has now built one for overheated humans.
The Do Hiemon Box, nicknamed the "human refrigerator," is a stainless-steel personal cooling booth tall enough for an adult to enter. The booth is maintained at about 15 C, while air chilled to 5 C is directed at the user's head, neck, shoulders and back. Its manufacturer says spending about 10 minutes inside can help relieve symptoms of heat exhaustion.
Standing 2.13 meters tall and mounted on wheels, the booth can be moved around factories and construction sites. It automatically shuts off after 20 minutes to prevent excessive cooling. Since its launch in April, more than 130 companies have reportedly installed the booths. At roughly 1.5 million yen ($9,200) each, they are an expensive refuge, though operating costs are relatively low.
Elsewhere, construction workers are finding frozen drinks, ice cream and air-conditioned rest booths every few floors. In farming communities, signs urge people to work for 30 minutes and rest for the next 30.
Japan's adaptation extends well beyond cooling booths. Tokyo officials have encouraged office workers to wear shorts, T-shirts and trainers under an expanded Cool Biz campaign. The national high school baseball championship has split games into morning and evening sessions to avoid the hottest hours, while farmers are planting heat-tolerant rice varieties and experimenting with subtropical crops such as avocados.
The measures would once have sounded eccentric. They now read like a survival manual for a warming world.
Europe, meanwhile, is discovering that a heat wave does not end when temperatures fall. It lingers in depleted reservoirs, damaged crops, shrinking rivers and hardened soil.
France recorded 5,764 excess deaths during its severe heat wave between June 17 and July 2, according to provisional public health data. The Paris region alone accounted for nearly 2,000 of those deaths, with elderly people suffering the greatest impact.
Scientists say Europe's drought is no longer simply a story of missing rainfall. Western Europe emerged from a relatively wet winter, but exceptionally high temperatures allowed the atmosphere to pull far more moisture from rivers, lakes, vegetation and soil.
A World Weather Attribution analysis found that the extreme evaporative conditions were made about 80 times more likely by climate change in western Europe and 40 times more likely in eastern Europe. Soil dryness was made five times more likely in the west and 11 times more likely in the east.
Europe's 2026 drought arrived roughly two months earlier than the severe drought of 2022. The Copernicus Climate Change Service said conditions remained critical across much of the continent in late June and had deteriorated further in central-western Europe following an extensive and prolonged heat wave.
The economic consequences are already mounting. Europe is expected to lose about 9 million metric tons of grain this year. France faces its worst corn harvest in half a century, while Romanian farmers have lost crops across more than 1 million hectares.
Water levels along Europe's major rivers have also fallen sharply. The Rhine at Lobith in the Netherlands dropped below the minimum recorded during the famously hot summer of 1976, restricting cargo traffic and reducing hydropower generation. Parts of the Loire have shrunk into narrow streams, while seasonal lows have also been reported along the Danube.
The hotter atmosphere is creating a vicious cycle. Heat draws moisture from the ground. Dry soil loses its ability to cool the air through evaporation. Temperatures rise further, vegetation becomes more combustible and wildfires spread more easily.
That same physical process is unfolding in different forms from Seoul to Tokyo and across Europe.
The world has entered a survival game against extreme heat. Every country is now learning its own way to play it.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.