Stoat - Where?

Forces Of Nature

Japan seems to have gone nuts at the moment. Not the people that is (well, not more than usual), the country itself. In the last week we’ve experienced 6 typhoons of varying strengths, including the one now raging outside as I type this. The wind at the moment is so strong that only a few fool-hardy gaijin and adventurous (read, drunk) Japanese will venture outside. It was quite amusing to come back from work to the bike park and find that 90% of the bikes had been blown over (that’s a lot of bikes). Sort of like a bike graveyard.

As well as the typhoons, Mt Asama has been erupting for a while now, causing the surrounding towns to be evacuated. The translated evening news I caught the other night helpfully reminded people not to walk on the volcano, just in case the thought crossed anyone’s mind. Flooding has recently happened in the south (as usual), but also closer to home in Nagoya, which is a lot rarer.

And to top it all off, we’ve now had earthquakes, and pretty big ones at that. On Sunday night there were two earthquakes, one a 6.9 and one a 7.3, just off the east coast. To put that into context, the earthquake that happened in Kobe in 1995 was about 7 on the Richter Scale. If these had hit on land, there would have been a lot of damage. By the time the shocks hit Gifu, they were a relatively modest 3-4. This was still enough to make the train station I was standing in ripple disturbingly though, which was disconcerting to say the least. They lasted for over a minute each as well, which is a pretty long time when the floor is moving underneath you.

Not counting the totally random eathquakes Manchester had 2 years ago, England doesn’t really go in for extreme nature. Natural disasters; they’re things that happen on the other side of the world. Maybe Day After Tomorrow wasn’t as stupid as I thought… No, wait. It was.