Japan has deployed more than 2,000 firefighters to battle the country's biggest forest fire in three decades. At least one person has died in the blaze, which has torched more than 5,200 acres around the northern Japanese city of Ofunato since Thursday,

This blaze is the largest forest fire Japan has faced since a 1992 wildfire in Hokkaido, which destroyed more than 1,000 hectares of land. The current fire in Ofunato is exacerbated by the region's unusually dry weather. February 2025 was reported as the driest February in over two decades, with very little rainfall.