大雨

[dorchadas]

For the last few days, it’s been raining in Hiroshima and the surrounding prefectures. And when I say rain, I’m not just talking about the usual way the rainy season in Japan turns out, where you don’t want to leave your house without an umbrella no matter what the sky looks like and where two foreigners new to the country can get caught in the rain until a kind convenience store owner takes pity on them and gives them an umbrella for free. No, I’m talking about this:

Source: Scenes of chaos after floods and landslides wreak havoc in western Japan

Eighty (Edit: 150) dead, at least. Dozens missing. Millions under an evacuation order. Some places doubled or tripled the average rainfall for the whole month in less than a week. The city of Kure, where I never quite made it to Sushi Tatsu for kaitenzushi, had large parts ordered evacuated (Edit: and is currently mostly cut off from the outside world by landslide debris). The first of the dead, washed away in an overflowing river, was found in Akitakata, a few miles from Chiyoda where I lived. Takehara, where we went three times to the Bamboo Festival and where the anime Tamayura is set, full of muddy water. The Kamogawa in Kyōto, the river that runs through the eastern part of the city and of which I have wonderful memories of strolling along its banks at twilight, has overflowed to the point where the walking paths next to it are completely inundated. Someone I know was nearly killed by a landslide and forced to take shelter in a hospital, after which he went out with emergency crews and rescued twenty people before finally being able to go home thirty hours later.

Chiyoda is in the mountains, so it’s not likely to have much flooding there, but that means landslides are even more of a worry. I went to the Kitahiroshima Town homepage, to the disaster prevention section, and found this as the most recent announcement:

7月7日午後4時に、北広島町全域に発令していた避難勧告を解除しました。

なお、大雨警報は継続しており、河川が増水し、土砂災害の恐れのある状態が続いていますので、引き続き注意してください。

Which reads:

"At 4 p.m. July 7th, the evacuation order for the Kitahiroshima area was rescinded. Still, as alerts of heavy rain continue, the rivers keep rising, and there is great danger of landslides, exercise caution."

So that’s good, relatively! They’re not in as much danger as I feared, and one of our old students posted a picture from her backyard and the only problem visible is the creek slightly risen. Another person I know marked himself safe, which is good, and one of the teachers wrote a post about how her condo is fine and the roads are clear, but the nearby grocery store is closed and everything smells of mud. A couple people I still haven’t heard from, but for the moment I’m assuming that it’s because they don’t post on Facebook very much or aren’t on it at all. I hope so, anyway.

If things had turned out differently, I would have landed in Japan today as part of a two-week vacation, focusing specifically on Hiroshima and western Japan where we lived, and obviously the entire vacation would have been ruined. We wouldn’t want to be in the area drawing on extra resources when there are ongoing rescue efforts and who knows how accessible anywhere we would have wanted to go would be. Not much of a chance of Sandankyō being open and accessible after all that rain, I think, and who knows if the train from Hiroshima to Izumo is running. The Kamogawa is flooded, Arashiyama is under an evacuation order. The coast of the Setonaikai is covered in mud from landslides and standing water. We would have just gotten in the way.

All of this is just awful.

Edit: Looks like even getting to Hiroshima would have been hard:

"No bullet trains were running west of Shin-Osaka Station, about 17 minutes away, and West Japan Railway Co. officials said they had no idea when they might start up again."
Source: Tourists visiting western Japan stranded amid flood warnings and canceled trains.

Edit Edit: As I thought, Sandankyō is closed until the 11th. The water isn't on in Onomichi, and the city website is filled with notices about where to go to get water, like this one in easy Japanese. Hiroshima City is closer to back to normal, but there's still not much extra food in the groceries and convenience stores. I guess it's better that I'm still in America.

Comments

[tilmon]

It looks terribly scary. Floods do so much damage, and the clean-up takes so long afterward. I remember the hurricanes that hit my grandparents' home as a child, and how the smell lingered into the next year. By the time the fetid air had fully been exhausted from the area, a new storm was on its way.

That picture--is it downtown Hiroshima? It seems familiar from when I visited long ago. And all the descriptions of Kyoto and pictures of Osaka too remind me that I walked where there is now water.

[dorchadas]

It's the northeast part of the city. I didn't go there often, but we went to a performance of Othello at the women's college there.

Hopefully this is the last gasp of the rainy season and there's no more rain! I saw a picture of blue skies in Hiroshima City, so maybe it's over.

[helvetica]

Such devastation, that's awful :( I hope that all your loved ones are okay <3

[dorchadas]

I got an email back from Kaminaka-san today saying that Chiyoda wasn't affected by landslides, so all our old students are fine!

[helvetica]

Great news! :)