Weather Report Reaches 100 Million Submissions by Tomohiro Ishibashi

"Weather Report¹ finally hits 100 million submissions!"

The moment this announcement appeared on our internal Slack channel, the comments section exploded with congratulations and emojis flew across the screen. Applause reactions, party poppers, "100 million" symbols, and for some reason, even rice ball emojis—the display turned into a colorful celebration, like a small digital festival.

One hundred million submissions. That's nearly as many weather observations as Japan's entire population, all delivered to us. From sunny days to stormy weather, from snowy mornings to clear afternoons, observations sent from across the nation and around the world.

Now, how should we share this milestone on our blog? The PR team sitting near my desk was deep in discussion. "Maybe ○○ should write it?" "No, that might be too challenging a topic for them." "Should the forecast center write it? Or maybe the app development team?" The conversation went in circles with no resolution. That's when I couldn't help but jump in.

Me: "Well then, how about I write it?"

Staff: "That sounds perfect! Let's go with that!"

The Day Weather Report Began

November 2005, I still vividly remember when the Weather Report officially launched. Earlier that spring, our Cherry Blossom Project had collected photos from across the nation, revealing the cherry blossom front. By summer, typhoon reports were beginning to show us real damage conditions on the ground.

That's when we became convinced: "The people who understand local weather best aren't meteorological experts but the supporters who are actually there." Back then, we often quoted that famous line from detective dramas: "The case isn't happening in the conference room, it's happening at the scene!" We thought this was the same for weather forecasting.

I was leading our consumer business division (which we called BtoS²) at the time. "This is going to dramatically change weather forecasting!" We were just a small team, but we had plenty of confidence and momentum.

An Era Without Smartphones or Social Media

Back then, smartphones didn't exist yet, so we had to develop all the submission collection features ourselves. We built a dedicated function for attaching photos to emails and prepared tools that allowed staff to edit photos and comments in real-time using a special mobile language called cHTML. Then, the night before launch, I tried adding this line to our homepage:

"Your Weather Reports will change weather forecasting."

Some team members cautiously asked, "With so few submissions, forecasting won't really change. Are you sure it's okay to write that?" But I joked back, "Actually, this line might be so enticing that we get flooded with reports and crash our servers," and we decided to keep it as written.

Day One: 244 Reports and a "Persimmon" Observation

The day arrived. I watched the submission count with anticipation. The first report that came in had a photo and one simple line:

"Every year, persimmons grow on the neighbor's tree."

Honestly, it had nothing to do with the weather. But somehow, I remember feeling happy about it. At the end of the day, we counted 244 submissions.That day, weather forecasting did not change.

If we had received a flood of reports from day one, I had planned to march over to the forecast center with a confident smile and make a big pitch about the power of our supporters, but I decided to wait a bit longer.

Meanwhile, the team remained energetic and enthusiastic. The fact that we had collected this many submissions without even having a specific theme felt like a miracle.

In an era before social media had developed, complete strangers had connected with our vision and taken the trouble to send us reports—that reality became our greatest source of strength.

From there, we tried every possible approach to increase submissions: regional feature pages, point systems, observation equipment giveaways, weather presenter recruitment with supporter voting, and 24-hour live broadcasts.

This is how the culture of "creating content with supporters" spread throughout our entire company.

The Lesser-Known Origins of BtoS

Both outside and inside the company, people often assume that I was the one who created our BtoS and "WITH" concepts.In media interviews, I'm often asked, "You're the one who created this concept, right?"While I was indeed the driving force, I actually wasn't the one who first planted this "seed."

It was our founder, Mr. Ishibashi, who gave birth to the concept of "Supporter" represented by BtoS and drew up the "WITH" concept as the foundation for service development. He believed without doubt that the mobile era was coming, and repeatedly said, "When that time comes, users themselves will become the creators of content." And paraphrasing Lincoln's famous words, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," he would say in almost every meeting, "From now on, it's with the supporters!"

Mr. Ishibashi had strong feelings about the mobile business.I think this stemmed from the tragic maritime accident that was the origin of our company."If mobile technology had existed back then, the Kukomaru tragedy might have been avoided..."When he spoke about this, you could hear the emotion in his voice.

That regret was the starting point of the BtoS and "WITH" philosophy, and it is our origin.From the team's perspective, when we were told that, well, we had no choice but to do it. No matter what anyone said, even if we sometimes faced criticism for various reasons, we would keep going with this approach. If we gave it our all and failed, that would still serve as valuable learning for everyone.With that resolve, we've walked this journey step by step, sometimes taking detours.

Gratitude to Everyone Who Built This Community With Us

Weather Report, which we've built up bit by bit since that day, has now reached 100 million submissions.

The accumulated experiences we've shared with supporters are recorded there. This includes not only those who participate almost daily, but also those who happened to encounter our site and participated just a few times, and those who stopped participating along the way due to personal circumstances. The contributions of all these people are recorded there.

We may not yet be a major platform representing the world, but our foundation has definitely strengthened and our community has grown.We're now entering an era where generative AI will create all kinds of content.But what we're proud of is that these 100 million submissions were created by the will of real human beings. These are records sent by people who connected with our mission of "reducing disasters" and "protecting the global environment," capturing and sending us their local weather observations.

No AI can replicate these human experiences and motivations.We'll continue to grow this platform further while leveraging the power of AI.However, the ones nurturing this community have been, and will continue to be, our weather observers.

I'd like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this milestone. Let's continue to build the future of weather observation together.

（Written by Tomohiro Ishibashi, Weathernews Representative Director, President）