Not just my imagination - intense rainfall is increasing in Japan

Floods and record rainfall in Japan in summer don't seem to attract all that much attention internationally, but my feeling was that "record rainfall" has become a near routine summer headline in the Japanese news.

And yes, Googling "record rainfall Japan" does seem to bring up on the first page stories headed that way from 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and now 2017.

The most recent cases -

*  15 were killed in floods earlier this month, and the damage looks large

*  Just a day or two ago, reports of rainfall in the Akita area (which I visited on my last trip) also used the word "record".  No one killed, but 12,000 told to evacuate and 500 houses flooded:

According to the Meteorological Agency, one part of the city of Akita had received a record 340 mm of rainfall during a 24-hour period that ended at 7 a.m. Sunday.

Record amounts of precipitation were also recorded in several other parts of the prefecture, with some areas breaking their monthly rainfall records for July, it said.

OK, and here is a report less than a day old, wherein the Japan Meteorological Agency, clearly a part of the Chinese/UN/socialist international conspiracy about climate change (sarc), confirms the impression:

The number of times it rains cats and dogs in Japan has jumped alarmingly in the last 10 years compared to when records of rain intensity began to be compiled.

The annual occurrences of a heavy downpour exceeding 50 millimeters in one hour has increased by a whopping 34 percent nationwide in the last decade compared with that in the 10 years from 1976, according to observation results by the Japan Meteorological Agency.

This means that repeats of the torrential rain that caused enormous damage to northern Kyushu at the start of this month are likely in the future.

Rainfall exceeding 50 mm per hour is often described in Japan as "rain falling like a waterfall," which signals a time when one should think about evacuation.

Most of drainage facilities in urban areas are designed based on that amount of rain, but when it exceeds 50 mm in an hour, water could gush into underground shopping complexes and other places.

The annual number of occurrences of heavy rainfall exceeding 50 mm per hour in the 10 years from 1976, when the agency started its observation, totaled 1,738. In the decade from 2007 it totaled 2,321, increasing 1.34 times, according to data collected by the agency’s Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System, known as AMeDAS.