Archive for October 2004
The Land of Disaster
In Japan, we have suffered from many natural disasters in the past, for example, the Ise Bay Typhoon (1959), the heavy rain in Tanabata day (1974), and the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (1997). Each disaster caused serious damage and people who experienced the events recall them every year. Those who experienced this year's disasters will be busy remembering them too because we had so many of them this summer -- not only disasters, but also abnormal weather… this summer was extremely hot and many people suffered heat exhaustion.
On September 6th, two earthquakes occurred in the area of the Kii Peninsula and we worried that the expected big one might happen after them. Fortunately, it didn't.
Now, many people in Niigata Prefecture are away from their own houses and staying at refuge centers. The big earthquakes which occurred in Niigata made it impossible for them to get on with their normal lives. Many houses were partially or completely destroyed and, what is worse, there was heavy rain after the earthquakes.
We also had "unusual" typhoons this year. The number of the typhoons that hit Japan is extraordinary, and most of them were very strong. Every year Japan is hit by two or three typhoons on average and they do damage to some extent. This year, however, we have had 10 typhoons so far. Each of them brought heavy rain to many parts of Japan and rivers flooded in some areas.
The Miya River near my house was about to overflow and I felt scared of the flood (and the typhoon) for the first time in my life. The rainstorms caused mudslides and people in some mountainous areas are still in the refuges.
It is expected that a big earthquake will occur in Tokai district in the near future. I wonder what will become of Japan and my life if this earthquake should in fact occur. I can't help thinking that there is nothing that remains forever: I may lose what I have now, including my possessions and… family, relatives and friends.
I feel sorry for the victims and the bereaved of this year's disasters and I just hope that the next year will be more peaceful without any disasters.
Tokyo Art Beat
Hot off the press: TokyoArtBeat.com, a Web site that lists current art and design shows in Japan's capital. This is an amazing, well-made project, available in both Japanese and English, that sports a crisp design and state-of-the-art coding -- quite apart from being genuinely useful.
On a linguistic side-note: Olivier Thereaux and Paul Baron, the site's founders and administrators, are both Tokyo residents and native speakers of French. Native French speakers have this thing about the H-sound at the beginning of words: ask a typical French speaker to pronounce the word "heartbeat" and you'll get something like "artbeat". But there's more to the site's name: the English word "beat" also refers to the area patrolled by a police officer -- or, more specifically, to the patrol itself, the round or path that the police officer traverses on a daily basis. If you think of art as a space, the "beat" is a path through this space. Very clever.