SocietyJapan battles extreme heat with night shifts and ‘human fridges’

As human-caused climate change makes extreme heat more frequent and severe, Japan is adapting to increasingly dangerous summers. At one flower farm, workers switched to harvesting at night under greenhouse lights after a colleague suffered heatstroke. More than 10,800 people were treated for heatstroke in one week last month, twice the number recorded in the same period of 2025. In Osaka, warehouse worker Taichi Konishi cools down by stepping into…