Last Saturday in the early afternoon, we had a huge dust storm all over the 関東 area. It started out as a very nice day, sunny 15°C, I went for grocery shopping in just a light sweater. Then around 2PM, the sky suddenly became dark, great gusts of wind started whistling around the corners of our building, we could see the road signs and city lights shaking in the street and parked bicycles being blown away. The sky became dark yellowish / light brown as the huge dust cloud passed over us. Then it was over in 15 minutes.
I couldn’t take a good photo as my girlfriend wouldn’t let me open the windows or open the door to go outside (we just cleaned up the apartment, so letting all this dust come in was definitely not a good idea), so I got this photo of the event from surround’s photostream on Flickr.
Apparently, these dust storms happen often in the Kanto plain at the turn of spring. This huge plain all around Tokyo is heavily farmed and parched fields, from the very dry winters we have here, go up in dust with the strong winds marking the coming of spring.