Luckily only 1 died so far.
Largest fire in half a century.
Wow, that’s fucking awful.
The video showed a lot of high winds carrying those flames, but the fact that nobody died is quite incredible.
That somehow hit close to me. A while ago I did a search for akiyas (empty houses for sale) in the Oita area. Found a nice one just a few kilometers from that fire. 
Have since shifted my focus on other (more western) parts of Kyushu, closer to Fukuoka.
Typical in rural Japan is that you have clusters of (mostly wooden) houses close together, making fires like these hard to contain. This also makes finding a house without nosy neighbors close by quite difficult in Japan… 
Fires can easily jump from house to house in this kind of neighborhood.
