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| courtesy of pjhuang1 from Flickr |
It used to be that typhoon season was more of a Late Summer-Early Fall phenomenon in Japan. But since the Earth has been entering a wacky weather era of late, that season has now been bumped up to start from Late Spring. On NHK News this morning, the regular 9 p.m. broadcast went on for 2 hours, half of which was totally devoted to the machinations of Typhoon No. 4. And she's a beauty. She's been tossing the Kinki and Kanto areas for the past several hours.
The usual scenes of commuters having their umbrellas murdered by just opening them up have been shown, along with the de rigueur live broadcasts from JR Shinjuku Station and a Kanagawa seashore by reporters who got the short end of the microphone. Had a nostalgic thrill when it was announced that my old subway line, The Tozai Line which runs from the western end of Tokyo all the way into Chiba Prefecture, had to suspend operations since the winds were going over 20 m/s. I used to hear and experience those suspensions a fair bit since I lived by Minami-Gyotoku Station in Ichikawa City which is part of the exposed section of the line.
The other typhoon I personally experienced today was a logistical one. One of the higher-ups at my school initially assigned me to sub for one teacher yesteday when she had originally meant to have me there for the entire week. I had this cold feeling about something not being quite right when I finished the classes yesterday, and sure enough I got the call from her a half-hour into the morning schedule, basically apologizing and asking whether I would be able to sub for Wednesday and Thursday mornings. I took the high road and didn't snark about the error; just said that there would be no problems. Luckily, there was a free substitute teacher at the school so the morning is covered as is the afternoon for today. But frankly, I'm not a big fan of sub teachers having to fill in for pretty heavy classes right from the first day of the course.
