Friday 9 October 2009

The day after

Today's sky doesn't have the glorious brightness that usually follows a typhoon. Dust and dirt have been swept away by the winds, and for a brief while last night Mt Fuji towered over anywhere in Tokyo high enough to see it, but today the clouds are back.
Going to work yesterday Hiro was saturated within two minutes of walking outside.  A raincoat helps up to a point but with the wind the rain comes from all directions making an umbrella totally redundant.  Such is the nature of a typhoon's onward march, by the time he got to his destination - 23 minutes on the subway - no changes - the sky was clear and blue.
Many trains were cancelled - if winds greater than 90km/hour are recorded, services will be suspended.  This naturally is a great inconvenience for the people who are on the train and often stuck between stations, and in the early morning very likely to be standing in a packed carriage.  Pity the people with weak bladders or irritable bowel syndrome... 
Life seems back to normal in Tokyo today with futons and washing hanging from local balconies.


* Update: It seems like 2 people have been killed - one from a falling tree at a shrine, one a newspaper delivery man who was on his paper run killed when his bike hit a fallen tree.  (The ability of newspapers to get their morning deliveries out and on time and dry is truly remarkable.. though in this case at terrible cost to a delivery man...)  One person is missing and there is conjecture about whether the death of a surfer who drowned should be counted in the typhoon statistics.  (I was amazed several years back when down at Kamakura before a typhoon, at the number of surfers in the water who were waiting for the big waves from the typhoon.....