Natural Disasters
On August 31, the first teaching week I was in Japan we had a typhoon come through. That one narrowly missed Hiroshima so it turned out to be just a particularly windy and rainy day. It also had an added bonus of having a few students not coming so the day was less hectic than usual. Unfortunately it was in the one week where the previous teachers were here and so i missed out on some extra on the job learning from them, but you take the good with the bad.
Following hot on the heals of that on September 5 there was an earthquake. I was sitting in my apartment reading at about 7:30pm when the floor started to shake up and down. At first it felt like a big truck driving by but soon it grew enough that I thought it must be someone in the flat above or below moving something heavy around or jumping. Then the apartment started shaking from side to side and it finally clicked. For residents of Japan this is a common occurrence and nothing to worry about, but being as experienced as I am with such things as earthquakes I had no idea what to do. I wondered if I should stay or leave. If I stay and it gets bigger then the building might collapse, but trying to leave may be something you're not meant to do in the middle of an earthquake. Using the elevator was out of the question of course, but if while running down the stairs it did get bigger then who knows if it would be enough to cause me to fall and break a few things. Luckily my usual energetic nature saved the day. After sitting around pondering what to do and not wanting to make the effort to leave unless it was necessary the shaking subsided.
I spent most of the rest of the evening with the TV on reading and occasionally trying to make any sense of the graphics on the news about the quake or spot some numbers indicating the size. At around midnight there was another quake, but by then I was a seasoned veteran and realized that stoically doing nothing was a good way to survive such a frightful ordeal. Following my heroic but sadly unsuccessful efforts at gleaning some useful information from the news on Japanese TV I asked someone the next day and found out that the quake was around 3 on the richter scale.
Following August's typhoon I discovered what the graphics on the news actually meant. This came in useful when I saw a typhoon was going to be hitting sometime on September 7. Unfortunately I was unaware of how severe typhoons can be because the last one came close but managed to missed us, and I assumed that it didn't get any worse than the last one. By the end of my first class it was blowing a gale and raining a little. I had a few hours before my next class and in that time things got quite a lot worse. It never seemed like there was a whole lot of rain, I'm not sure why because it was coming down in bucketloads. The wind was screaming around the buildings and making an enormous racket. Before the next class I decided, not without encouragement from others, to go to my apartment and make sure everything was ok and locked up securely.
Arriving in my apartment hoping to just lock everything and leave I was greeted by a large pool of water in the kitchen/living room. There was a little water that had gotten into the currently unoccupied bedroom, but the big problem was swimming pool in the living room. After throwing some towels and sheets down to soak up the water I spied the culprit. The wind, with gusts up to 216 km/h was blowing water in through the runners at the base of the kitchen window. I did my best to jam a towel against the window's base and then headed back to school as we had not yet received confirmation that students in the next class were not coming. After waiting around at school for a while we finally confirmed that nobody else was coming for classes. A few women from church were nice enough to come around and help me clean up the mess in my apartment.
The typhoon hit quite hard, there were downed trees, shop fronts torn off, roofs wrecked and many signs and sheets of metal had been flying around the city. When the next typhoon comes I shall be ready and will have everything locked up nice and tight, with special measures taken on certain leaky areas. This typhoon also set a record, 7 typhoons to hit Japan in a calendar year
The Japanese are amazingly quick to fix any obvious problems anywhere, and the problems caused by the typhoon was no exception. The fallen tree pictured above was cut up and gone by the time the raining stopped. Work on traffic lights that had been bent went on around the clock until they were fixed. By the next morning au, the shop above with the front torn off, was all wrapped up in blue plastic and open for business. That's the same shop pictured at 3pm the previous day sitting in tatters with the shopfront torn off.