By Junko Ogura, Chris Lau, CNN
Tokyo (CNN) — For Yoko Toshima, winter hits harder these days.
“Perhaps it is because I am getting older, but the way the snow falls seems more extreme than before,” she said.
During the warmer months, the 76-year-old’s small hometown in northern Japan seems an ideal place to live, offering lush parks and historical shrines. Daisen’s renowned summertime fireworks displays draw hundreds of thousands of visitors.
But when winter blows in, all that shifts.
“Living alone is fine during the summer, but winter is very challenging because of the snow,” Toshima said.
There were times these past few months, under freezing temperatures, when snow piled up “like a mountain” at Toshima’s doorstep, she said. No matter how hard she tried to clear it, it kept coming back.
“There are days when I cannot do anything for one or two days, and I end up being snowed in,” she said. “I have felt anxious about my own safety. Recently, I have begun to feel that you never know what might happen.”
While her ordeal was arduous, it could’ve been much worse.
At least 68 people died this winter – all but 10 of them over 65 – when record-breaking snow hit the country’s north, including Toshima’s home prefecture of Akita. According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, most died while removing snow.
In neighboring Aomori, at the tip of Japan’s main island Honshu, snow piled up to 1.7 meters high in February, the most in 40 years, according to the Japanese Meteorological Agency.
Japan’s aging population is a long-running issue, impeding economic growth and putting immense pressure on the public coffers.
But more immediately, the demographic changes leave many isolated elderly people to face life-threatening blizzards on their own. And, as Toshima suspected, the storms are getting worse, supercharged by climate change.
Satoko Minatoya, 66, who lives alone in Aomori, said that during the winter she tried to access a service offered by the military to help senior citizens clear the snow. But the soldiers appeared to be overwhelmed, too.
The helpline “must have been constantly busy since it rang without anyone answering, and in the end, I gave up,” she said.
“I have no close relatives nearby, so there is no one I can rely on. I try to do as much as I can by myself.”
For decades, elderly citizens have tended to stay in regional Japan, while their children move to major cities for better work opportunities. The snow-prone northern prefectures have a median age of about 50, five years older than that of the capital Tokyo, according to the 2020 census.
It’s not just at home that the snow poses a threat.
Minatoya got into difficulty on the road when her car got covered in snow. Even after an hour trying to remove all the snow, there was a pile on top that she couldn’t reach.
“While driving, that remaining snow slid down onto my windshield blocking my view, nearly causing a car accident,” she recalled.
“As I have gotten older, I’ve lost the physical strength and mental energy to deal with situations like this.”
While snow is hardly new to northern Japan – a region as close to Russia’s Vladivostok as it is to Tokyo – climate change and warming ocean currents off the coast are bringing increasingly unpredictable weather, an expert told CNN.
“It’s like bomb snow,” said climate professor Yoshihiro Tachibana from Mie University in southern Japan, likening this year’s snowfalls to an explosion.
He said icebergs broken away from the Arctic due to warming temperatures have been moving toward Japan’s northern coast, bringing cold mist.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, Japan also gets cold periodic jet streams from Siberia, as wind directions change.
The cold