About 10,400 wakasagi, a cold-water smelt never native to Haizuka Dam, died amid heat and drought in Hiroshima. Nobody knows who brought them, and Japan's invasive species law does not cover fish moved within Japan.
Warming seas pushed a pufferfish north across the Tsugaru Strait, and the hybrids do not fit Japan's 1983 table of edible species and parts. How the rulebook caught up, and why the Mediterranean has the same gap.
Murakami's salmon run fell from 55,000 fish to 1,400 in a decade. Now the town is spending about $32,000 to attempt what Norway and Chile have not: closing the life cycle of chum salmon entirely on land.
Three lions died at Tokyo's Tama Zoological Park, with dehydration and organ failure. July humidity there was an ordinary 77 percent. Japan's heat index weights air temperature at just 10 percent.