It's 30 years this week since the powerful Typhoon Mireille came barreling into Japan. It hit on September 27th 1991, packing some of the most powerful winds ever recorded here, as well as bringing major devastation to several parts of the country. It was a major experience for me personally too, one I'll never forget. Basically it kicked my ass and marked a sea change shift in my attitude to typhoons, which up until that point had been somewhat brash. 

 

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 English word 'typhoon' derives from the Japanese 'taifu', 台 (tai) 'pedestal' and 風 (fu) 'wind'. Quite why Japanese put these winds on a 'pedestal' was a bit of a mystery to me, until this one.

 

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 the first, though it was already nearly the end of September when I got here. 

 

I recall the gravity in the words of Kayumi, the secretary at the school my friend and housemate James and I were working at, when she warned us that a typhoon was coming and gave us the low down on how we should prepare for the 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. 

 

Japanese houses typically have metal shutters on the outsides of windows and sliding doors that when typhoons come you can fasten solidly. These are not only to protect the glass against impact from heavy objects in flight but also from the bending and possible shattering effects of the winds and we were urge to close these up at the first signs of escalation. However as there was no air conditioner the house soon became almost unbearably hot and stuffy. A tentative peer at the scene outside revealed that house roofs were not flying through the air all around us, so we figured that for a while at least we could probably open one of them up to occasionally open the sliding door itself for a few seconds. It was heavenly to get some cool - or maybe just different - air into the place and the sudden inrush of wind was kinda exciting. So feeling a bit like naughty schoolboys, we continued to gaze out on the proceedings as they developed, or didn't. 

 

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 for a period of several long seconds, 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 this provided a natural channel for the winds to advance unimpeded. The sounds it made, now whistling, now roaring, were pretty impressive. Then, after a while, just as we assumed things were just getting going, I recall James saying, ’Hmm, is it my imagination or is this easing off?’. In little more that an hour the show seemed to be all over. So that’s it? Surely not. But it was. I couldn’t help a feeling of underwhelm, even in a weird way disappointment.

 

Kayumi soon checked in with us. Despite saying things like 'wasn’t that terrible?', and 'were you guys okay?', she did soon add in response to our undisguised underwhelm that it had turned out to be not as bad as feared, and that we'd been lucky. However, coming from Wales, and having spent pretty much of the seven years prior to arriving in Japan on the west coast with the Irish Sea for company, I was left thinking that these typhoons didn’t much compare in their ferocity and fury with the north Atlantic winter gales that would regularly blow in six months of the year. We never freaked out much, or did any preparation like suspend all regular activity and hunker down for half a day. We took a few precautions yes, but pretty much just got on with stuff as normal. So for a while, a good few years in fact, when it came to typhoons I must confess I was a bit blasé. 

 

Over the next five years typhoons came and typhoons went, and nothing happened to cause me to revise my view. Every time there was a warning and (Japanese) people around me got all intense and serious about preparation I kinda went through the motions not to worry them, but inside I wasn’t overly concerned. I remember one time confounding everyone by not cancelling my 3-day road trip, in my trusty van - futon, bicycle and guitar in back - to Kochi in Shikoku island, which has a Pacific coast. That one, the van did rock'n roll a bit as I recall, quite a lot really I guess, 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 the town of Saijo, Higashi Hiroshima, in the best house I’ve ever had in Japan. It was owned and built by an American church - nothing whatsoever 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 not just because it was large - there was a big living room, open plan with a spacious kitchen, and two decent sized bedrooms upstairs all of which didn't conform to standard Japanese room sizes - but, crucially, because it was built to western specifications. This meant the door frames were like 6ft 6 high, which at 6ft 2 meant I didn't have to be looking out not to bang my head all the time, a constant hazard in the places I’d lived till up until then. 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). It was a great house to live in and we called it 'The Castle'.

 

At the beginning of that year I’d made the decision to leave the language school I'd worked at for the four years since coming to Japan in '86 and enroll as a ‘research student‘ at Hiroshima University, actually more a front for ‘working as a musician’. To make sure the rent got paid I'd assembled a smattering of English teaching jobs and on that particular day, September 27th, a Friday, I was in Hiroshima city, about a 40 minute drive away, at one of them - three classes at a university that in two years time I would become a full-time teacher at. 

 

All week l’d heard the usual frenetic proclamations from all my Japanese friends about a fearsome typhoon that was on the way, but in my usual fashion I hadn’t really paid it much heed. On the day, everyone at the university too was full of foreboding. They even canceled the last class to allow everyone to make their way home safely and it wasn't till I was full time there that I realised what a radical move on their part that actually was. Still figuring I’d heard all it before though, I didn’t really follow their advice to do likewise. Instead I took the opportunity to stop off in the city centre 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 beginning to pick up. 

 

I’d arranged with a mate, Higaki-san, to drop in at his repair shop in the town center on my way home to pick up a piece of musical gear I‘d had him do some work on. When I arrived he was visably distraught, and clearly 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. I’m closing up right now”. 

 

I was a little taken aback by his how frenzied his manner was, but I had been a bit surprised to be honest how sharp the gusts of wind were I’d just caught making my way to his shop. I apologised for keeping him waiting, got right back in the van and headed the mile or so home. 

'The Castle' was on a hill, in a slightly raised area anyway just on the edge of town, and as I drove now I could really feel random gusts impacting on me. The last stretch was a couple hundred meters along a slightly raised and exposed road through ricefields, just about wide enough for two cars to squeeze by each other and with a few 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 and I momentarily lost control. For a second I was peering directly over the edge into the ricefield to my right from my drivers seat directly over the front wheels. At that instant though, base chakra survival instinct kicked in to override logical brain function and I witnessed myself steer left to correct it. Jeez! That was a bit much, I thought.

 

My heart thumping, I had to battle to keep the van straight on that narrow road in the wake of several more erratic blasts, some fairly prolonged and insistent though fortunately none as violent. With about another 50m to go, all of a sudden I couldn't get myself home quickly enough. Soon, with a mighty sigh of relief, I turned into the narrow access road to the house. The parking place was at the rear, immediately on the other side of which was the shelter of a high wall, banking for the Sanyo Expressway about 20m down below. I got out of the car, the winds were already making some crazy sounds through that channel. It felt really quite menacing.

 

I put my key in the door totally unprepared for the madness that was to greet me. The instant it was open I was met by a crazy rush of wind coming right through the house from the front. In the morning, as often happened in the hot season, the sliding glass patio doors to the garden were left open, with just the screens across. There was nothing unusual about this (for foreigners anyway), the threat of crime was virtually nil and this 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, making a loud click-clacking sound as they went and adding a kind of madcap percussive element to the wind's loud whistlings. In the living room itself anything light (like paper) and not weighted down was madly flying around, joined in flight by a ragamuffin assortment of dry leaves mostly that had found their way in.

 

I rushed over and closed the doors as quickly as I could, laughing out loud at the absurdity of the situation and secured them shut. I then realised then that the screens, being on the outside, would likely get damaged so I quickly ran round to the garden, took them out and stashed them against the far side of the house away from the main direction of the wind. 

 

With the front door main entrance at the back, the garden was in the front and looked down a gentle gradient of mostly rice fields, a fair few houses scattered about too, towards the center of town. It was from this direction that the wind seemed to mainly be coming from now, and pretty damn strongly too, certainly worth a rating of 'pretty stiff' on my Atlantic gale default scale. One way typhoon winds differ from those of gales is that they are erratic and come from many directions at once and it's this that makes them unpredictable and hazardous to venture out in. Gales on the other hand are usually prevailing winds gone mental and roaring in one way, off the sea. 

 

Outside the noise was intense. I stood out there for a few minutes taking in the scene. It wasn’t raining yet, the air was overly warm, ominously so, and the atmosphere rather eerie. It was then that I happened to glance up from the garden towards upstairs, 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 into a door-shaped thick plastic moulding that then sits in the frame as a replacement door as a seal against the outside, with the sliding door itself permanently open, and it's held in place by four screws at the corners. I noticed that not only were the screen doors hammering back and forth on their runners up there too, but the plastic moulding appeared to have come loose and was banging away, and this had dislodged the airconditioner. It says something about the noise the storm was already creating that I couldn't readily hear this, I only realized when I caught saw it.

 

In alarm I rushed back in. Bounding up the stairs, I could now ‘hear’ my bedroom, and it sounded like a bunch of chimpanzees were having a tequila party in there. I got to the door and turned the handle but 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. 

 

Inside was just insane. Instead of the chimps there was a poltergeist at work. Like downstairs only double, everything that wasn’t weighty or held down was in the air and flying, and in the middle there was a veritable whirlwind of dry leaves whizzing around, those already discarded scattered everywhere and new ones arriving all the time through the open veranda doors. The sound was outrageous. Here was my bedroom, the crazy winds thundering in through the gaping void in the south facing wall and whistling madly through every crack and crevice the doors situation could conspire to create. 

 

More than a bit freaked out and not laughing much anymore, I quickly removed the screen doors, somehow still in place, and clipped the sliding door shut on the one side. 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. For that I’d need at the very least a good solid screwdriver and I was going to have to go and find one sharpish. 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 with a vengence 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 that high wall. With difficulty I lifted up up the back door of the van, but they were so powered up by now that they literally rocked the van to and fro as they rushed in through the open tailgate and I had to swiftly jump in and shut it behind me, and formidable 10-second struggle to get it down again ensued. With the winds shut out, I frantically ripped open the covering of the spare tire well where my paltry tool collection was stashed and there, sure enough, there were a couple of decent screwdrivers. The wind proved too strong to allow me to open the back door from the inside to get out again, stupid to even try, and I couldn't budge it more than a few inches. So I clambered over the front bench seat and left by the driver's door. It was only a few yards but what a relief it was to make the safety of the house again. 

 

Back up in my room the poltergeist now had a few friends round. I could do nothing but leave them to it and I started doing battle with the moulding, where its three still functioning screws were holding it very tightly in place The screw heads, I realised at a glance, were on the veranda side and they were red rusty. I hadn't fitted myself, it was in there when I moved in, so God knows (literally) how long they had been in there.

 

As my experience getting in and out of the car had just shown, the winds had by gone to a whole other level and I realised once on the veranda that outside amidst this maelstrom of swirling wind dervishes was no place you'd want to be. Unscrewing this damn thing was soon proving a challenge. Where it had come loose and was banging, the plastic around the screw had broken and come away completely so at least I didn’t have to worry about that one, but two other three were rusted solid. I remember thinking “WD-40”, at the same time knowing I didn’t have any. It took as much sweat inducing adrenaline-fueled Aries heave-ho as I could muster to loosen them but finally, after much cursing and praying and everything in between, 10 or 15 mad minutes later I had managed to wrestle the whole thing free. By now it had gotten quite dark. All the while my mantra had been ’PLEASE let me get this damn thing out before the fuckin' rain starts!’. I gratefully and speedily closed the doors, clipped them shut and breathed perhaps the hugest sigh relief I've ever breathed, as a silence finally fell upon my poor desecrated bedroom.

 

At one point during my tussle with the plastic moulding,I’d suddenly caught sight in the gathering dusk of something airborne coming up the hill towards the house. As it approached it saw it was surprisingly large and black, obviously a tarp, but what a menacing, nebulous 'shape' it created, jet black against the turbulent dark greys of the darkening sky. I watched amazed as it steadily approached, then went flying about 20 meters over the roof and on its merry way. It was such a freaky vision, a real ‘Wahhhhhh!!!’ moment, not unlike a visitation from one of the Nazgul, the 'Black Riders' from Lord of the Rings. Well, perhaps it wasn't quite like that really.

 

It was certainly such a relief to finally have the whole house secured. I gazed on the room, what an unholy bloody mess it was. With the doors wide open all the time I was grappling with the aircon the leaf/paper/trash content had multiplied alarmingly and 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 how much worse that would've made it. Unthinkably so. 

 

Then I remembered about shutters, that the house would have them. 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 almost diminished twilght, with the wind whipping fiercely around me I ventured back outside to have a look at what we had. 

 

There were two downstairs rooms, one a traditional Japanese-style six mat tatami room, the other the large main room with the kitchen at the far end. Though the casing they were stored in was metal, I discovered, the doors themselves 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 would be a way to fasten them properly in place, but with no flashlight at my disposal 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 slim metal storage cage, the last one was solidly wedged in, and exposed now they were already rattling away rather dangerously. I was torn between leaving them like that in the hope they might give at least some protection to the plate glass, but figured that even though they were heavy, without each supporting the other they might well get blown around and could prove more a hazard than a help. In the end I thought 'fuck it, better put them back', quickly retreated inside again and pulled the curtains across. With no more immediate emergencies to deal with I figured I could finally relax, at least a bit. Okay then, a nice cup of tea, I thought. 

 

No sooner had I made my pot of tea though than the power went off. Oh crap. It was a shock. I hadn’t factored in at all that this might happen. In the tatami room I had a meditation space/sanctuary set up and there were candles. I lit on the altar, it was a comforting sight. Also in that room I had a number of foam rubber mats, used not only for my 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 and 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 though I probably wouldn't have ensconsed myself in that room, but I was surprised how comforting and womb-like it felt and it proved a good move.

 

Despite the escalating cacophony outside, there was now real peace, finally. I knew typhoons didn’t tend to last that long. Usually they're fairly fast moving and will typically pass over in two to three hours at most, in stark contrast to Welsh Atlantic gales that can roar all night long, and through the next day too in some cases. However, I did have a knawing feeling that this bugger was only just getting started. 

 

From the solace of my sanctuary I listened intently as the noise duly increased. All kinds of noise, the simultaneous mad whistling, whooshing and deep roaring of the wild winds, accompanied by tapping, thumping, rattling and clanging of all the stuff they were kicking around, and up and down. It was easy to decide that I’d be staying put there that night, especially considering my bedroom was all but out of action. I made one foray to use the loo, and was at once amazed how many drafts had suddenly sprung throughout the house, the flame of the candle I was carrying soon sputtering, lurching first one way then the other, before it went out on me. 

 

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, rising just once to shove a paper wedge in the inside runner of the sliding door to stop it from rattling. Slipping inside my futon and settling myself down for what would become the rest of the night, with water, my tea and all the munchies I could muster from the kitchen cabinets for company, I lay down and closed my eyes. 

 

The next several hours were a blur. They became a body of time that appeared neither particularly short nor interminaly long, but rather time shorn of its customary perception, as one might perceive it during a fever or otherwise altered perspective. Throughout it, it seemed I was always at least semi-conscious of this monster ‘the noise,’ as it bore down. It invaded my awareness, something unleashing a particularly intrusive clatter or thump to shock me back from my inner plane reveries. Still in semi-consciousness, my awareness returned to my physical predicament a few times. Whenever it did, there it was, the monster, still hammering away full bore. But mory overriding perception of that night was that time stood still, there was no time. Weirdly, 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 of the unwaveringly still sanctuary where I drifted in and out, safe inside the lighted aura that my altar candles cast.

 

Next thing I knew, I had really awoken. The beast was gone. I sat up. All was still. There was a change in the air, and it there to be felt. The heavy wooden shutters hastily pulled outside had sent the room into almost total darkness, save for the merest millimeter of a crack between them now of brilliant white light, and it was through this that morning was indeed announcing itself. And it was quiet, an almost impossible quiet. 

 

I rose and tentatively opened up the sliding door to the hallway. Sure enough, it was light, and blindingly it came streaming right in. I went out into the main room, pulled back the curtains and surveyed the scene. In the garden a couple of the small trees had broken and there were masses of leaves and assorted other stuff strewn all across the lawn. But apart from that it didn’t look all that different. The clock on the wall was ticking away, 5.15 it read. 

 

I opened the main door at the back and went outside. What a bright morning! All was still, so very still, and ever so fresh. Gone, it seemed, was the lingering summer humidity and I gratefully breathed in the freshness. I checked on the van. It was there, it hadn't got hit by anything, all was 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 winds had almost forbidden me to even stand when I'd gone to look for the screwdriver hours earlier, and there was next door’s metal toolshed, upside down, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the roadway. 

 

I went over and took a look, wow. The metal frame was a bit mangled where it had obviouly landed. I walked out past it to the main road, the one I‘d nearly got blown off 12 hours earlier. What a mess it was, the road itself was strewn with branches and leaves and there was all kinds of debris everywhere, those mostly small stuff. There was no one around. As far as I could see all the neighbourhood 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 above too just buzzing blueness.

 

As 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 surrounding area, even beyond to the Seto Inland Sea with its countless islands and Shikoku 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 up there in the gift of the perspective it had offered. From that vantage point the school building 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, further up away and above the place of my contemplative bird's eye view, there stood three very fine pine trees, tall and distinctive. These could be seen against the sky from just about anywhere in the town. This morning, however, they were gone. Ryuo-zan was missing its front teeth.

 

I went back into the house to make a cup of tea. I tried to switch on the stove but the power 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 Japan. The most prominent casualty in our area was Itsukushima Jinja, the famous shrine that sits so gracefully on the water at Miyajima 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 day or so later. By far the biggest issue though was the water. We didn’t have any 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. In the madness of the previous evening 'd completely forgotten that nugget of advice, so there was no water at all in this house right from the off. 

 

The loo was the biggest problem. It was an old style pit toilet, often found even nowadays in country areas in Japan, that has to be pumped out about every month, for which 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 from a plastic bottle, it seemed 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 the water supply 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 this very reason - and there are several large reservoirs around there. 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 now known as the Boulevard, which just existed then as a short, abnormally wide (for the time) stretch between where Coco’s family restaurant now is 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 left. We had to take our own 20-liter plastic containers, ’politanku’ in Japanese, and line up for ages to fill them, with a limit of three per person. As the weeks went by and our neighbourhood still didn’t have water, more and more areas did so it was easier to fill up at friends' houses. 

 

That powerful typhoon had a number that at the time that I understood to be "19", 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 wrought, not just to Hiroshima but many other parts of the country too. 

 

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 a run of others that are kinda damp (literally) squibs. 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.

 

From Wikipedia..

"Mireille produced record wind gusts at 26 locations, with a peak gust of 218 km/h (136 mph) in western Honshu. The winds caused record power outages across Japan that affected 7.36 million people, or about 13% of total customers. Mireille also left extensive crop damage totaling $3 billion, mostly to the apple industry, after 345,000 tons of apples fell to the ground and another 43,000 were damaged on the trees. The storm damaged over 670,000 houses, of which 1,058 were destroyed, and another 22,965 were flooded. Throughout Japan, Mireille killed 66 people and injured another 2,862 people, including ten deaths on a capsized freighter. Elsewhere, the typhoon killed two people in South Korea, and its remnants brought strong winds to Alaska."