Japan is certainly a country with plenty of potential for natural disasters — my mother once visited us for two weeks, and managed to experience a huge typhoon, an earthquake and a volcanic eruption all during the time she was here. September in Japan is storm season, and every week we watch them form in the Pacific, hoping they won’t hit Japan, Okinawa or some other populated area. Today a large tropical storm named Man-yi (or just good old “typhoon no. 18” in Japan, which doesn’t have the tradition of naming storms) hit Japan’s main island of Honshu dead-on, making landfall near Osaka and heading north to drench Tokyo and Northern Japan. The winds and rain caused 380 flights to be canceled, halted Japan’s bullet train network and caused massive flooding around Tokyo and Kyoto. Happily J-List’s home prefecture of Gunma is as far from the sea as you can get in Japan, so we’re usually spared most of the damage from incoming typhoons.
September is typhoon season in Asia.
