Japan Fights Its Largest Wildfire in More Than 30 Years

Japan’s largest wildfire in more than three decades was burning through a forested area of a small coastal city on Sunday after killing at least one person, damaging dozens of homes and prompting evacuation orders for thousands of residents, fire officials said.

The roughly 1,800-hectare (4,500-acre) fire has been burning for days in Ofunato, a city on the east coast of Japan’s main island that is about 300 miles northeast of Tokyo. It had grown by 400 hectares since Saturday.

Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said it had learned of the fire on Wednesday afternoon, and that at least 84 homes had been damaged by Wednesday night. Japanese media reports said that police found a man’s body on the road Thursday morning while checking the area. The local authorities confirmed the man’s death, but didn’t give any other details.

The government issued evacuation orders to around 4,600 residents on Wednesday, according to the fire agency. Some 1,200 were in shelters as of Sunday morning.

Nearly 1,700 firefighters from 14 prefectures have been dispatched since Wednesday to fight the blaze, according to city officials. Video footage from NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, showed firefighting aircraft circling above billowing smoke clouds rising over a forest, as orange flames raged between tree trunks.

It was not immediately clear how much progress fire crews had made in containing the fire, or whether the fire had caused additional damage to structures since Wednesday. The fire agency could not be reached for comment.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, the agency said.

The last forest fire of this scale in Japan burned more than 1,000 hectares on the northern island of Hokkaido in 1992, a fire agency spokesman said on Sunday, the Japan Times reported.

Ofunato’s driest season is typically from January to March, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. Last month was the driest February there in over two decades.

Fire officials in Japan were also battling two smaller wildfires on Sunday. The first, in Yamanashi prefecture, west of Tokyo, began on Wednesday and grew to 120 hectares by Saturday, according to the fire agency. The second, in the northern prefecture of Nagano, started on Friday and reached 100 hectares by Sunday.