At about 7am today I was woken by Typhoon 18 causing havoc. It was really blowing hard outside for a while there. Tree were bending over, leaves where flying around and it was raining heavily. It's at times like this when you can see the wind, and it looked cool.
I have a lot of respect for nature after living through a couple of earthquakes in Japan & San Francisco, several bushfire seasons in Sydney & Adelaide, and one amazing hail storm in Sydney, where my house was attacked by hail ranging in size from a can of beer, baseballs, gold balls, all the way down to your cute little hail that makes people who don't know any better think of snow. With all that in mind, I decided to go outside and check it out. There's nothing like being in the middle of some serious weather.
First thing I noticed was how fresh the air seemed. Then I noticed that my landlord was battling with a window on the empty apartment below me. The window had come loose sometime after the storm had started and was flapping so hard it bent a hinge. That started a little DIY sesson between us where we preceeded to removed the window, which was heavy, straighten the hinge with a hammer, and then replace the window. Afterwhich I took a little walk around the house to see if everything was ok. Which was when I noticed that a tree had fallen on a neighbours 4WD, crushing the roof and breaking a few windows. The storm was picking up at this point so I decided to head in-doors to enjoy the illusion of safety and do a bit of typhoon research.
A lot of typhoons strike Japan between June and October. August and September are particularly prone to these tropical storms. Typhoons develop in the tropical waters north of the equator in the Western Pacific and are defined as tropical storms with gusts of at least 17.2 meters per second (62 kph).
Similar storms are called by different names, depending on where they develop. In the Indian Ocean, they are known as cyclones, while in the Atlantic, they're called hurricanes.
In the United States, hurricanes are given boys' and girls' names, but in Japan the Meteorological Agency gives typhoons numbers according to the order that they develop, and this is how they are referred to in weather forecasts.
Japanese meteorologists classify the typhoons into five levels of size and intensity. TV weather forecasters, therefore, may refer to an approaching storm as "Typhoon No. 8 of large scale and average intensity."
An average of 27.8 typhoons form each year, of which 2.8 pass across Japanese land.
Typhoons can be powerful enough to decimate large areas - not just in Japan but also in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast and East Asia. There have been a number of large, destructive typhoons in Japanese history; among the biggest was the typhoon that struck Ise Bay in September 1959, claiming 5,000 lives and destroying or damaging 800,000 homes.
There hasn't been that much damage in recent years because of improved forecasting techniques, better ways to prevent and escape from disasters, and wider availability of information through the media. The severest typhoon in the past 10 years took the lives of 19 people in September 1991.
And here's some of what the Japan Times has to say on Typhoon 18 [aka: Typhoon Songda].
Powerful Typhoon Songda left at least eight people dead, 21 missing and 385 injured...At least 20,000 people were evacuated as the typhoon became the seventh to land on the Japanese archipelago this year, a record for one calendar year, the Meteorological Agency said. The previous record was six, marked both in 1990 and 1993.
The article goes on to describe the lost of a 6,315-ton Indonesian freighter with 22 crew members [of which 3 were found dead, the rest rescued], a Cambodia-registered lumber freighter with a Russian crew of 18 which capsized and sank [2 dead, 2 missing], a 62-year-old man found dead after he was buried in a landslide, an 80-year-old man who died at a hospital after being found collapsed by his home [police believe he was knocked down by the winds and struck his head], and the loss of several important landmarks, including a Chinese parasol tree at Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park that was famous for having survived the 1945 atomic bombing.
All quite exciting really. If you know where Niseko is, then you can see from the maps that ol' 'phoony 18 drove straight through town. If you don't know where Niseko is, and therefore have no idea of the plight I've just endured, this search should bring up some helpful information [and guaranteed to take you to a lot of home-made, image-heavy, broken-english, colour-shocking sites that I've grown to both love and hate since moving here].
Note: One post was harmed in the writing of this account, due to a split-second power outage which had the effect of turning every electrical device in the house off & on really quickly.
Also Note: The writing in the bottom map [8日8時] translates to the 8th day at 8 o'clock.
