How Singaporeans living overseas are handling the heatwaves

AFPA pedestrian walking with an umbrella to shield from the sun in the midst of a heatwave in Tokyo's Shinjuku district in June 2022.

SINGAPORE — When temperatures in Japan hit 35°C and above earlier this month, Ms Charissa Tan could only manage a 10-minute walk to the train station before she felt giddy. 

According to Today, the 37-year-old later fainted from heatstroke as she was alighting from her train ride and was taken to the hospital, where she was discharged after a few hours. 

In Tokyo, where Ms Tan has been working for the last eight years, temperatures soared above 35°C for nine days straight from June 25. After weeks of extreme heat, Japan's capital finally saw a few days of rain this week.

Ms Tan is just one of many people around the world struggling with extreme weather conditions, as several countries have been plagued by heatwaves over the last few weeks.

Countries that are badly affected such as China, France and the United Kingdom have issued warnings to their citizens to avoid staying outdoors.  

After her heatstroke scare, Ms Tan, who works in marketing research, said that she now always leaves the house with an anti-UV umbrella, a big bottle of sports water, a handheld fan, and an ice pack that she wraps in a towel around her neck. 

“The weather here is not the kind that you can tahan (Malay word for bear), the heat is more of a skin-piercing kind of pain,” Ms Tan said,.

She added that whenever she steps out of the house, it feels like her body is in an oven. 

Although she has an air-conditioner in the house, she has had to keep the temperature to 27°C due to a power crunch warning by the Japanese government.  

Similarly, 33-year-old Charlotte Isa always ensures that she has ice packs on hand and has opted to drive more instead of cycling. 

“In June, it was so hot that many of the plants on my balcony got burnt by the heat. They just dried out and turned crispy,” she said.

The mother of two, who works as a medical device representative in Tokyo and has been in Japan for four years, added that the change in weather the past week has caused her family to fall sick because their “bodies weren’t able to adapt properly”.

Over in England, Ms Goh Siew Lian, a 75-year-old retiree living in Brighton, described shopping and taking public transport in the current weather as "dreadful".