The use of や...など in news

Question

１８日から１９日、関東地方や東北地方などで雨がとてもたくさん降りそうです

This sentence is taken from a news article.

I know that など means "and so on," "etc," and や means that there may be more things or people implied.

But this kind of language doesn't seem precise enough. However, it's often used in news. In the article about rain, they encourage people from the regions to be careful. Isn't it necessary to be precise about which regions must be on the alert? (Kanto and Tohoku clearly must be careful, but which place exactly is meant by など?..)

I wonder how Japanese people would interpret this particular など. Could it mean a place like Hokkaido, for example, which is not too far from Tohoku? If it could, why isn't it necessary to mention it so that there is no room for ambiguity and guesses?

Answer 1

There are at least two questions regarding similar usage of など:

• Difference between と and や～など
• Towards a better understanding of など

But I guess those are not what you are asking here.

As for why it is used in this case, I believe it's an effort making trade-off between brevity and accuracy. Its connotation is something like: "there will be a heavy rain around Kanto and Tohoku regions, so whoever living in surrounding areas should also keep an eye on it".

Kanto and Tohoku are very large divisions, while the actual weather does not care about human society. Thus the real alert map would be painted in a quite patchy picture, where a certain town outside the region could be more dangerous than another inside it.

Eventually they do report a detailed list specifically which municipalities in which prefectures are involved, but it takes a couple of minutes to rotate over on the news strip, or easily twice or more scrolls on the website, which is not very possible to contain in a simple news flash.