With the onset of the massive typhoon Hagebis today, it’s got me reflecting on experiences with typhoons over my 30-odd year connection with Japan, and one in particular that led to a major attitude shift on my part. 

 

The English word 'typhoon' derives from the Japanese 'taifu', 大 (tai) 'big' and 風 (fu)  'wind'. Typhoon season in Japan is generally from late August through October, with the six week period from early September to mid October being the most intense. 

 

The first one I remember was in mid/late September, soon after moving out of the center of Hiroshima city up to the northern suburb of Kabe in 1987. This was my second typhoon season. I don’t remember anything from my first, though it was already nearly the end of September when I got there. 

 

I recall the gravity in the words of Kayumi, the secretary of the school my friend and housemate James and I were working at, when she warned us that a typhoon was imminent and gave us the low down on how we should prepare for its onslaught. How diligently we followed her every instruction. Back in those early Japan days, merely the ring of the word ‘typhoon’ was exotic, and kindled feelings of awe and apprehension, coming as we both did from a part of the world that didn’t have them. 

 

Most Japanese houses have metal shutters on the outsides of windows and sliding doors that when typhoons come you can fasten solidly. We were urge to close these up at the first signs of escalating winds. However, as there was no air conditioner, the inside of the house soon became almost unbearably hot and stuffy. After a tentative peer at the scene outside, where house roofs were not flying through the air all around, we figured that for a while at least we could probably open one of them up, periodically opening the sliding door itself for a few seconds at a time to allow air in. It was heavenly to get some cool - or maybe just different - air into the place. And we began to gaze on the proceedings as they developed. 

 

I remember watching fascinated as a bamboo grove was sent bending almost to ground level for the duration of a gust, about ten or fifteen trees in unison, and then released. Kabe is situated on the western bank of the main Ota River that flows down through Hiroshima city before breaking into a delta of five rivers at the central area, so the winds were coming up that natural channel unimpeded. The sounds it made, now whistling, now roaring, were pretty impressive. Then, after a while I recall saying to James, ’Hmm, is it my imagination or is this weakening..’. In little more that an hour it seemed to be over. So that’s it? Surely not. But it was. 

 

I couldn’t help a feeling of underwhelm, despite Kayumi saying 'Wasn’t that terrible?', and 'Are you guys okay?' when she checked in with us afterwards. She did say too though that it had turned out to be not as bad as feared, and that we'd been lucky. Coming from Wales however, and having spent pretty much the seven years prior to arriving in Japan on the west coast where we have the Irish Sea for company, I was left thinking that these typhoons didn’t much compare in their ferocity and fury with the winter gales that regularly blow in off the Atlantic for five or six months of the year. And I must confess, for a while, a good few years in fact, when it came tro typhoons I became quite blasé. 

 

Over the next few years, typhoons came and typhoons went, and nothing happened to cause me to revise my view. Every time there was a storm warning and everyone around me got really intense and serious about preparation, I kinda went through the motions not to worry them, but inside I wasn’t overly concerned. I remember once confounding everyone by not cancelling my 4-day road trip, in my trusty van, futon, bicycle and guitar in back, to Kochi in Shikoku island, which has a Pacific coast. It did rock the van a bit I recall, quite a lot actually.  But hey, it was all fine, even kinda fun, just like I knew it would be. 

 

Then came 1991. 

 

In mid-September of that year I was living in Saijo, Higashi Hiroshima, in the best house I’ve ever had in Japan. It was built and owned by an American church, nothing to do with me I hasten to add, and as there was currently no pastor in place they were renting it out. It was great because it was large. There was a big living room, open plan with a spacious kitchen and two decent sized bedrooms upstairs, but, crucially, because it was built to western specifications. The door frames were like 6 foot 6 high, which at 6ft 2 meant I didn't have to be looking out not to bang my head all the time, as I had in all the places I’d lived hitherto. The kitchen countertops also were of a serviceable enough height that you didn’t incur backache just chopping your veggies (though I had to keep a wooden box handy for my girlfriend to stand on). 

 

At the beginning of that year I’d made the decision to leave the school I'd worked at for the four years since coming to Japan. I'd become a ‘research student‘ at Hiroshima University, actually just a front for ‘working as a musician’ and I'd assembled a smattering of English teaching lessons too to make sure the rent got paid. On that day I was in Hiroshima city, about a 40 minute drive away, at one of them, three classes at the university that in two years time I was to become full-time at. 

 

All week l’d heard the usual frenetic proclamations from all my Japanese friends about a fearsome typhoon on the way, but in my usual fashion I hadn’t really paid it much heed. At the university too everyone was full of forebodings and they evebn canceled the last period to allow everyone to make their way home safely. Still figuring I’d heard all it before, I didn’t really follow their advice to do likewise, instead stopping in the city for an hour to browse a guitar shop. Even so, I didn’t really idle, and when I did finally arrive back in Saijo the winds were indeed beginning to pick up. 

 

I’d arranged with my friend Higaki-san to go and pick up a piece of musical gear I‘d had him do some work on at his guitar and repair shop in the town center and I popped in there on my way home. When I arrived he was visably distraught, and obviously hugely relieved to see me. 

 

“Paul! Finally you're here. Didn’t you hear there’s a typhoon?”. 

He quickly handed me my gear. 

“You’d better get home as soon as possible“, he said. 

”I’m closing up right now”. 

 

I was a little taken aback by his how frenzied his manner was, but in truth I had been a bit surprised by the sharpness of the gusts of wind I’d just caught when I'd got out of the van. I apologised for keeping him waiting, got back in the van and headed the mile or so home. 

 

My house was in a slightly raised area jon the edge of town, and as I drove now I could really feel the gusts impacting the van. The last stretch, a few hundred meters along a slightly raised and exposed road through ricefields, was not wide enough for two cars to pass and with a couple of feet drop on either side. All of a sudden a particularly strong gust sideswiped me and, I swear, the two wheels on the passenger side lifted off the ground. As they hit back down again the van lurched to the side as I momentarily lost control. For a second I was looking over the edge into the ricefield to my right. At that instant though, base chakra survival instinct kicked in to override logical brain function and correct it. Wow! My heart was in my mouth.

 

I had about another 50m to go. My heart was thumping as I battled to keep the van straight on that narrow road in the wake of several more random blasts from the left hand side. Some had been fairly prolonged and insistent and it was a mighty relief to get home. The parking place was at the rear the house, immediately on the other side of which was a very high wall, banking for the Sanyo Expressway about 30m down below. There was a bit of wind as I got out of the car, but it was basically sheltered there and it felt good to have made it.

 

I got to the door, put in my key and turned, totally unprepared for what was to greet me. The instant I opened the door I was met by a crazy rush of wind coming right through the house. In the morning, as often happened in the hot season, the sliding glass patio doors to the garden had been left open, with just the screen doors across. There was nothing unusual about this (for foreigners anyway), as the threat of crime was virtually nonexistent and it kept the house cool. But now those screen doors, three of them, were doing a merry dance, furiously and violently shooting back and forth on their runners and making a very loud click-clacking sound as they went, adding a kind of madcap percussive rhythm to the wild whistlings of the wind. In the living room itself anything light (like paper) that was not weighted down was madly flying around, joined in flight by a ragamuffin assortment of dry leaves that had found their way inside.

 

I rushed in and closed the doors as quickly as I could, laughing out loud as I did so at the absurdity of th and could easily get damaged. So I quickly ran round to the garden and took them out, stashing them against the far side of the house, away from the main direction of the wind. 

 

The front door was at the back here and the garden in the front, which looked down a gentle gradient of mostly rice fields but a fair few houses too towards the center of town. The wind seemed to be mainly coming up from that direction and was by now pretty damn strong, a rating of 'stiff' perhaps on my Atlantic gale default setting. One way the typhoon winds differ from those of gales is that they come from many directions at once, and it's this that makes them unpredictable and dangerous to venture out in. Gales, on the other hand, are usually prevailing winds gone mental, roaring one way, in off the sea. 

 

Also it wasn’t yet raining, it was just overly warm and eerie along with this erratic and ominously strenthening wind. It was then that I glanced up from the garden towards the second floor, where my bedroom was, to see a calamity in progress. There were the same sliding glass doors up there too that opened onto a veranda, and in one of them was set an old style, window-fit air conditioning unit. This fits snuggly into a hole cut in a door-shaped plastic moulding that then sits in there as a replacement door, a seal against the outside. It's held in place by four screws at the corners, with the sliding door itself permanently open. I noticed that not only were the screen doors also hammering back and forth on their runners up there, the plastic moulding had come loose and was banging away too, and this had dislodged the airconditioner. 

 

In alarm I rushed back in. As I was bounding up the stairs, I could ‘hear’ my bedroom, which increasingly sounded like there were a bunch of chimpanzees having a tequila party in there. I got to the door and turned the handle. It didn’t open, it was like it was locked. There was no lock on the door though, it was being held that firmly in place from inside by the sheer force of the wind. I put my shoulder to it and with more pressure than I would have imagined necessary, it gave way and opened. 

 

Inside was just insane. Instead of the chimps' party there was a poltergeist at work. Like downstairs only double, everything that wasn’t weighty or held down was in the air and flying around and in the middle there was a veritable whirlwind of dry leaves whizzing around, with those already discarded scattered everywhere and new ones arriving all the time through the open veranda doors. The sound was outrageous. The intermittent thumping of the plastic moulding, weighted heavily with the rocking lump of metal that was my air conditioner, and the wind whistling madly through every crack and crevice the doors situation could conspire to create. 

 

Horrified, and not laughing much anymore, I quickly removed the screen door and clipped the sliding door on the one side closed. Then I realized that to sort out the other side the only thing I could do was remove the whole bloody air-con and it's moulding, and for that I’d need a good solid screwdriver. I was going to have to go and find one. Pretty sure I had one somewhere in the van, I shot downstairs and outside again, to be at once assaulted by the winds. The same gusts that had nearly shunted me off the road earlier had by now found their way around the back of the house and into my parking place, and were hurtling mightily through the channel between the back of the house and the high wall. With difficulty I opened up the back door of the van. They were now powered up multiple times and they literally so rocked the van to and fro as they rushed in through the open tailgate that I had to swiftly jump in and shut it behind me. I ripped open the covering of the spare tire well where my paltry tool collection would likely be and there, sure enough, were a couple of screwdrivers. The wind proved too strong to allow me to open the back door from the inside to get out again, so I clambered over the front bench seat and left by the drivers door. It was only a couple yards but what a relief it was to the safety of inside again. 

 

xx

 

Back up in my room, I started doing battle with the moulding. It’s three still functioning screws were holding it very tightly in place. I hadn't fitted myself, it was in there when I moved in, so God knows (literally) how long those screws had been in there. The screw heads I soon realised, were on the veranda side so it was out into the wild winds once more.

 

As my experience getting in and out of the car had just shown, the winds had by now gone to a whole other level and outside on the veranda was really no place to be. Also, unscrewing this damn thing was soon proving a major challenge. Where it had come loose and was banging, the plastic around the screw had broken and come away completely so I didn’t have to worry about that one, but two of the others were rusted solid. I remember thinking “WD-40”, at the same time knowing I didn’t have any. It took as much adrenaline-fueled Aries heave ho as I could muster to loosen them but finally, after much cursing and praying and everything in between, I managed to wrest the whole thing free. It must’ve taken 15 or 20 minutes. By now it had got quite dark. All the while I'd been thinking ’I hope I can get this damn thing out before the rain starts’. 

 

At one point, while tussling with the plastic moulding in that gathering dusk, I’d suddenly caught sight of something airborne coming up the hill towards me. It was surprisigly large and black, obviously a tarp, a menacing, nebulous 'shape', jet black against the turbulent dark greys of the darkening sky. I watched amazed as it steadily approached, then went flying on its merry way right over the house. It was quite freaky, a real ‘Wahhhhhh!!!’ moment, not unlike a visitation from one of the Black Riders from Lord of the Rings!

 

It was a mighty relief to finally get those doors shut and the house secured. The room was a total bloody mess though, as with the sliding doors open all that time the leaf/paper/trash content had multiplied alarmingly. It was as if everything coming up the hill on the wind had ended up in there. Mercifully though there had been no rain. I was only too aware that if there had, how much worse it would've been, unthinkably so. 

 

Then I remembered about shutters. I hadn’t actually used them at any place I’d lived since Kabe, but if any occasion was worthy of them, I figured, this was probably it. I’d never even checked them out at this house, but in the now virtually full darkness, the wind whipping around me, I went back outside and had a look at what we had. 

 

There were two downstairs rooms, one a traditional Japanese-style six mat tatami room, the other a large main room, open plan with the kitchen at the far end. Though the casing they were stored in was metal, the doors themselves, I discovered, were wooden. The ones for the tatami room that I went to first were a little worse for wear, but I pulled them across anyway. I knew there was supposed to be a way to fasten them in place but with no flashlight I couldn’t find it. So, picking up a piece of stone from the garden, I wedged it hard under one side. ‘That will have to do’, I thought. 

 

I went on to the main room ones, but could only get two out of their storage cage, the next one was solidly wedged in. Exposed now to the winds, they were already rattling away and I figured that even though they were much heavier, without each supporting the other they would just get blown around like the screen doors had. So I thought 'fuck it, better put these back', and relievedly retreated back inside again. With no more immediate emergencies to deal with I figured I could finally relax, at least a bit. So, cup of tea, I thought. 

 

No sooner had I made my pot of tea though than the power went off. Oh crap. I hadn’t factored in that this could happen at all. In the tatami room I had a meditation room/sanctuary set up and there were candles in there. Also in that room I had a number of foam rubber mats, used not only for meditation but also for when people stayed over, so I spread some of those out on the floor. With a couple of pillows and a futon, I decided to make myself comfortable in there. I’d often hang out by candlelight, I still do, so it wasn’t much of a shift really. But for the power outage I probably wouldn't have ensconsed myself in that room, but I was surprised how good it felt.

 

Despite the steadily gathering cacophony outside, there was real peace, finally. I knew typhoons didn’t tend to last that long, they're fairly fast moving and will typically pass over in two to three hours (in stark contrast to Welsh Atlantic gales that can roar all night long, and the next day too in some cases). However, I had the feeling this thing was just getting started. 

 

And the noise duly increased. All kinds of noise, the mad whistling, whooshing and deep roaring of the winds, accompaned by the tapping, thumping, rattling and clanging of all the stuff they were kicking around, and up and down. I felt comfortable in my little sanctuary though, altar candles lit, and I decided I’d be staying put there that night. I made one foray to use the loo, and was at once amazed how many drafts there suddenly were all through the house, as the candle I was carrying soon sputtered and went out. As a child might pull the bedclothes up over their head and shimmy down into a secure, magically enhanced world within, I immediately retreated back inside my sanctuary, wedging paper in the inside runner of the sliding door to stop that from rattling. Slipping inside my futon and settling myself down for what would become the rest of the night with water, my tea and a few munchies, I lay down and closed my eyes. 

 

The next several hours were a body of time that appeared neither particularly short nor interminaly long, but rather shorn of its customary perceptibilties, as one might perceive time during a fever. Throughout it, it seemed I was always at least semi-aware of this monster called ‘the noise,’ as it bore down. It invaded my consciousness. Still in semi reverie my eyes opened a few times, and whenever they did there it was still hammering away full bore. Time stood still, there was no time. There was almost an accompanying sense that there had been no time either when this incessant rattling thumping thundering whistling whooshing and clattering had not been going on in the turbulent world outside the unwaveringly still, womblike and lighted aura that my altar candle cast.

 

Next thing I knew, I had really awoken. The beast was gone. There was a change in the air, there to be felt. The shutters pulled outside had sent the room into almost total darkness, but it seemed to be morning. And it was quiet, an almost impossible, deathly quiet. 

 

I tentatively opened up the sliding door to the hallway. Sure enough, it was light and it came streaming in. I went into the main room and surveyed the scene. In the garden a couple of the small trees had broken and there were masses of leaves and other stuff strewn around everywhere. But apart from that it didn’t look all that different. The digital clock on the video machine showed 5.15am. 

 

I opened the door and went outside. All was still, so very still, and ever so fresh. Gone, it seemed, was the lingering summer humidity. I breathed it in. I checked on the van. It was there, all as normal. Then, as I turned to come back in I glanced to the side, down our little access road, where the furiousness of the wind had almost forbidden me to even stand when I'd gone to look for the screwdriver the previous evening. And there was next door’s toolshed, unceremoniously dumped upside down in the middle of the roadway. 

 

I went over and took a look, wow. I walked out past it to the road, the one I‘d nearly got blown off 12 hours earlier. It was a mess, the road itself was strewn with branches and leaves and there was all kinds of debris everywhere. There was no one around. As far as I could see, the houses were okay. They all still had their roofs anyway. I stood there for a good while in the deliciousness of the impossibly fresh air. The sky was so blue.

 

When I turned around to walk back to the house, I glanced up towards the mountain up behind us. This was Ryuo-zan, with its viewing platform, which provided a wonderful panoramic view of the town of Saijo and the surrounding area, even over to the Seto Inland Sea and its countless islands away in the distance. This was a place I loved to go up to and just sit, particularly when I was manager of the English school and contemplating issues I bet all managers of schools (and other places too) probably inevitably get to have to contemplate. I had found real solace there in the gift of perspective it had offered. From that vantage point the school had looked about as big as a Lego brick, and as such could be picked up and placed in the palm of your hand, or otherwise dealt with. 

 

Up on the very top of that mountain, still away and above the place of my bird's eye view, there stood three very fine, tall and distinctive pine trees. These could be seen against the sky from just about anywhere in the town. This morning, however, they were gone. 

 

I went back into the house to make a cup of tea. I tried to switch on the stove but the electric was still off. Then I turned on the tap to wash up a few dishes, but within a minute the water tailed off. What, so no water either now? 

 

It turned out the storm had wreaked real havoc, not just with us but across large areas of western Japan. The most prominent casualty in our area was Itsukushima Jinja, the famous shrine that sits on the water at Miyajima. That had been smashed to pieces. There were floods, landslides and structural damage to roofs and general damage to property all over the place. As the news came in, I realised how lightly we’d got off, especially since the house was in a pretty exposed position. 

 

The electric came back on a couple of days later. By far the biggest issue though was the water. We didn’t have any of that for six weeks. That was a real problem, more than I would’ve ever imagined. One thing people always say to do as part of typhoon preparation is to fill up the bath. I'd only ever done that once, that first time in Kabe, so there was no water supply at all in this house right from the off. 

 

The loo was a problem. It was an old style pit toilet, often found even nowadays in country areas in Japan, and have to be pumped out about every month when the so-called ’honey wagon’ swings by. There was a small automated flush that would wash down from the bowl and we had to do that ourselves for the longest time. Getting the amount of water right so it didn’t cause overflow was a trick to learn. 

 

We weren’t the only ones to suffer these outages by any means, but this part of Saijo was the last in the whole area to get water back. Ironic actually, as Saijo is famed for the quality and abundance of its water - it's home to some very famous Japanese Sake breweries for that very reason - and there are several large reservoirs. However, we found out through this that Saijo water doesn’t come to us, at least not first off, but rather goes down to the more populous coastal towns of Kure and Mihara. 

 

Bottled water wasn't really a thing back then, so what happened was the City Government set up lines of giant tanks at several locations around town. The one we used, for folks who know a remarkably changed present day Saijo, was at the northern end of the road known as Boulevard, which just existed then as a short, abnormally wide (for the time) stretch between Coco’s family restaurant on old Route 2 and about 50m shy of what’s now the entrance to Saijo station. The tanks were there, right up against a barrier fence, with nothing to speak of behind it at the time, and the old Fuji department store to the right. We had to take our own 20-liter plastic containers, ’politanku’ in Japanese, and line up for ages to fill them, a limit of two per person. As the weeks went by and we still didn’t have water, more and more neighbouring areas did so it was easier to fill up at friends' houses. 

 

That powerful typhoon had a number that at the time I thought was 19, like this one today, but it now seems to have been changed to 20. It also later became known as Typhoon Mireille. But whenever you want to call it, it's still infamous for the havoc and chaos it brought, not just to Hiroshima but many parts of the country. 

 

It certainly changed my attitude towards typhoons, from then on I never took them lightly ever again. However, such is their nature that for every powerful one, you get three or four others that are kinda damp squib-like. You can never tell how it will go though so you have to prepare the same way for them all. And take your eye of the ball at your peril.

 

As I write this I’m hatches all battened and hunkered down in the bunker my house has become as we approach zero hour and the impending landfall of this massive typhoon. We know it will be somewhere scarily close, on the south coast of either east Shizuoka or west Kanagawa, around 30 miles away. And oh boy, am I prepared.