WAKAYAMA (TR) – A male resident here narrowly escaped a freak death in his sleep after a massive tree smashed through his roof, as extreme and chaotic weather battered the Japanese archipelago during the Golden Week holidays, reports TV Asahi (May 5).
On May 3, the terrifying incident occurred in the town of Shirahama, when wind gusts reaching 14.4 meters per second uprooted a giant tree from a hillside behind the man’s home. The timber plunged directly through his ceiling and into his bed while he was asleep.
“There was a massive boom, and it felt like the tree just rained down on me,” the resident recalled.
He survived the ordeal completely unscathed, despite the trunk piercing the mattress right next to where he was lying. “I had my head on that pillow, sleeping face up. It came down right by my ribs, missing me by just a matter of centimeters.”
Midsummer heat
The near-fatal close call comes as Japan experiences violent and wildly fluctuating weather conditions from region to region.
While the fierce winds wreaked havoc in Wakayama, parts of the Kanto region baked in midsummer heat. On May 4, temperatures in Tokyo’s Nerima Ward and Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture soared past 30 degrees Celsius.
In bizarre contrast, a deep freeze gripped the northernmost main island. Around noon on the same day that Tokyo sweated through 30-degree heat, the town of Hamatonbetsu in Hokkaido plummeted to a near-freezing 0.4 degrees Celsius. The sudden drop brought unseasonal, heavy snowfall that transformed the roads into a winter landscape, an incredibly rare sight for May.
Meanwhile, severe conditions also struck Miyagi Prefecture. In the town of Zao, blinding fog and howling winds battered holidaymakers, with footage capturing terrified children clinging desperately to their mothers to avoid being blown away.
