Japan’s Skies Turned Purple One Day — But What Seemed Lovely Was Actually a Warning

Like life, nature doesn’t send a warning before unleashing a disaster upon humans. Ancient humans looked to certain omens that could tell whether an apocalypse was about to break loose. Warning signs like an owl crying, cows behaving in strange ways, cracking mirrors, reddening skies, or sinister hisses in the breeze foretold them that something was wrong and they needed to batten down the hatches, or simply elope to a safe island. Just before October 11, 2019, the residents of Japan were jostled into a sense of eerie foreboding when they stepped out of their homes.

Blanketing the sky was a surreal, otherworldly purple-pink haze as if the cosmic flutist was playing a romantic rhapsody. But all this glittery romance was, was a deception glamorously maneuvered by the leader of the demonic realm, as X user @Desu_unknown put it.

@Desu_unknown was climbing a staircase, stepping out of a train station in Japan, when they noticed something sinister unfolding in the skies above. In a postcard they captured from the bottom of the stairs, the open exit gate reveals a glimpse of the sky, lit up like a potion simmering in a witch’s cauldron, electric purples and glowing raspberry pinks. It wasn’t just one instance. The internet, at that time, experienced a flurry of posts from Japanese locals, who shared images of the country’s tipsy sky as if it were running intoxicated on an alien’s vodka.

YouTuber Japan entertainment shared another montage of postcard-worthy photos of Japan’s skies suddenly morphing colors like a chameleon. In another viral post, user @pupupu42124 shared three photos of the skies rolling drunk in purple. Looking at the pictures, people imagined that a giant-faced monster was howling at them, spewing enormous clouds of purple dust illuminated by the sunlight beyond. “The purple sky is too eerie,” the X user wrote in the caption, according to Grok’s translation.

The entire city turned into an obnoxious neon nightclub, people said. Some said it looked like the skies seen in The Simpsons episodes. The fact that it was the time for the Halloween season made the purple sky even more enrapturing to people worldwide. Someone clipped a new word from their vocabulary to describe the notoriously shapeshifting sky - “pporappippam,” translating to “purple night.”

Bizarre theories started bubbling up from the comments section. “This looks like a face to me,” said @kelly4jelly, along with a sinister picture of the sky exploding with purplish clouds. Looking at the pictures of this purple sky, @Awesome93750613 was reminded of a lantern fish that is known to illuminate the darkness of the ocean with its surreal purple glow. 

For onlookers, this purpling light show might sound too romantic. Some might even want to print out these pictures and paste them into their art journals. But for the people of Japan, this purpling was actually an evil omen, foretelling them that a catastrophe was on the verge of bursting. The purple was a warning sign before Typhoon Hagibis. Even before people could decode the clue hidden in this purple sky, Hagibis unleashed its fury upon the residents, unleashing a cascade of wild torrential rains, a monster made of stormy waters that barrelled across the seas, encroaching on the banks and the fences, per SCMP.

Hell broke loose as a barrage of floodwaters meandered and rushed towards the city, like a giant tongue of agitated waters, salivating to swallow up the entire city. Scientists revealed that it was the most powerful storm to hit Japan since 1958. But how was the purpling of the sky connected with this typhoon? Well, the mystery lies in how the notorious light scatters in the sky after being radiated by the Sun.

When you look at the sunlight reflecting in a lake or a gleaming pebble, you may think that the light is white in color. But within this seemingly whitish light, the whole spectrum of rainbowy colors is trapped. As it spreads into the sky, the photons of light clash and bang against the chemical, dust, and moisture particles already lingering there. Depending on the wavelength of colors and the type of particles, certain colors of the spectrum are scattered more in the sky than others, a phenomenon called “scattering,” per NOAA.

Scattering, as NOAA explains, is the reflection of light by small particles, caused by water droplets or smoke particles. Meteorologist Jonathan Belles explains in Weather.com that the more the particles of moisture accumulate in the atmosphere, the more the light gets deflected and separated, which results in a purple-pink sky, instead of blue, exactly what happened during Japan's typhoon.

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