Typhoon 14

So for the second time since I got here this summer, a typhoon hit Japan. Once again, corporate emails trickled down from the top, announcing that tomorrow might be a "special holiday" if public transportation were shut down. Once again, plans were rescheduled. Hatches were battened down. My long-awaited first Japanese class was canceled. We clenched our fists and gritted our teeth and cowered in the corners of our waribashi houses, fearing the worst...

and ...

...

nothing. No wind, just a little rain. One of my friends down in eki-nishi claims that the wind blew a flowerpot off her windowsill, but up where I live the air was still and the crickets were singing. Just like the last typhoon, it was a bit disappointing after all the build-up.

But although it was a bit of a let-down, we were fortunate that it didn't come our way. Reading the news (and friends' emails) later, it sounds like Kyushu and western Japan got hit pretty hard - 40 inches of rain, 110,000 evacuated, 9 people dead, flooding, landslides, homes destroyed - but the storm veered away to the north after that. By the way, it's interesting - CNN.com keeps referring to it as Typhoon Nabi, but the Japanese don't name their typhoons. They give them numbers (then again, they give people numbers here too), so this was Typhoon 14. Nabi is the Korean name.

The sunset last night was incredible, though, and I think we owe it to the typhoon's atmospheric churning. A jumble of every sort of cloud imaginable - long, narrow, heavy, low cumulus clouds shorn apart by crosswinds, tiny puffy white clouds scudding along under big, lumpy stratocumulus sheets of grey... and as I left work, the setting sun lit it all up, like a spotlight stabbing through the dark to light up a stage! The sky exploded into a psychedelic light show, ragged, twisting snarls of clouds bathed in gold and red, the sky behind them radiant in every color of the spectrum! Higher up, two clouds parted to reveal a sliver of a crescent moon, escorted by two brilliant pinpoint stars. But the most surreal part was the eastern half of the sky, which was taken up by huge, looming, low-hanging clouds lit up with a rich glowing orange, casting the world below in an unnatural light, an eerie twist on the familiar, like wearing ski goggles in summer.

I scrambled home to grab my camera, but by the time it was in my hand, the colors had all dripped down and settled in a deep pool on the horizon. In futility I snapped a few pictures of the place where the sunset had been, but it had somehow lost its magic, like an apartment the day after a party, with its piles of half-empty plastic cups, crushed nachos, and sticky pools of unidentifiable crud on the floor.