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The story
On the afternoon of August 22, 2026, unforecast heavy rain and thunder pounded the Kanto region for hours, prompting Tokyo to issue a Level 4 Heavy Rain Emergency Warning. At Nogizaka46’s concert at Meiji Jingu Stadium, entry was temporarily restricted due to lightning near the venue, while reports of flooding and water intrusion poured in from across the region.
On 5ch, opinions split between those calling it “just an afternoon shower” or “business as usual,” and those insisting it was “abnormal rainfall nobody forecast.” The thread heated up further with theories blaming urbanization or global warming — and even a few conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure.
What people said
It never used to flood this often.
That's not chaos at all, just business as usual.
That's not an afternoon shower.
Heavy rain nobody forecast has been going for two hours straight now.
It's not even worth making a fuss over — hot, cold, it rained, whatever.
It's actually the opposite —
idiots only ever talk about work and data.
Especially middle-aged guys.
You forgot Fukuoka people (running joke that they're obsessed with weather talk).
https://hayabusa9.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/news/1787375579/
https://hayabusa9.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/news/1787383715/
https://asahi.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/newsplus/1787384600/
https://dec.2chan.net/up2/src/fu7150852.jpeg
It's Jingu, not Kunitachi.
Notice Regarding Entry at the Tokyo Performance of "Midsummer National Tour 2026" @ Meiji Jingu Stadium Due to Lightning Near the Venue — Saturday, August 22
2026.08.22
NEWS
Lightning has been confirmed in the area around the venue, so for safety reasons entry is being temporarily restricted.
Guests who have already arrived near the venue are being let in gradually — please follow staff instructions to enter and proceed to the covered concourse area.
Guests currently waiting in a safe location, such as a covered facility near the venue, please do not force your way to the venue and continue waiting where you are for the time being.
If it's pouring this hard, running won't help anyway —
walking it off with a calm face, that's what makes a real man.
That's a nasty way to wipe out.
Thank god for the rain radar app.
Hot, then cool, then hot again.
If this were really global warming, it should be getting hotter year-round — this doesn't add up.
Sounds like you're misunderstanding what global warming actually means.
It's less about temperatures simply rising and more about extreme weather becoming more frequent.
Record winter snowstorms and sudden heavy snowfall are also effects of warming.
Typhoon numbers are above average this year too, and that's another effect of warming.
It's HAARP and chemtrails, right?
Background and Key Points
Japan’s Meteorological Agency issues rain warnings on a five-tier scale, and a Level 4 “Emergency Warning” (特別警報級の一歩手前, technically 警戒レベル4相当) is meant to trigger evacuation-level caution — not routine advice, which is why posters like #42 note the label gets thrown around so often now that people are becoming desensitized to it. Nogizaka46 is one of Japan’s top idol groups, and Meiji Jingu Stadium, an open-air ballpark in central Tokyo, has no roof, which is exactly why lightning nearby forces a hard stop on entry rather than a mere delay. The “Underground Temple” nickname in the thread refers to the real Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel in Saitama, a cavernous flood-diversion tunnel often shown in documentaries — but as poster #39 correctly notes, it drains the Ayase/Naka river system northeast of Tokyo and does nothing for the western-originating storm cells that have been hitting the region lately.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t rain-vs-no-rain, it’s classification: whether this was an ordinary yūdachi (a short, predictable summer thunderstorm from daytime heating, as #62 defines it) or an unforecast anomaly. That distinction matters because Japan’s summer storms are increasingly “guerrilla downpours” (ゲリラ豪雨) — hyper-localized, radar-defying cells tied to urban heat-island effects, not the broader, slower systems yūdachi implies.
What outsiders may miss: no one in the thread mentions that Tokyo’s flood infrastructure is fragmented by river system, so a facility built for one part of the metro area offers zero protection elsewhere — a gap in Tokyo’s flood defenses that’s more structural than the “it’s just weather” framing suggests.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “The Weather’s Been Absolutely Insane Lately”.
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