The typhoon season has arrived. Typhoons remind me of my late father, who used to stay up almost all night watching the typhoon news on NHK every time he heard of a typhoon.
However, my father was not only usually very cautious, but he never even bothered to lock his front door, so it was very strange to see him only during typhoons. This was because my father had experienced the Ise Bay Typhoon, which caused a great disaster.
It was so powerful (900 hp) that it flooded the canals and rivers in the city, inundating not only the first floor of the house where my father lived but also the second floor. In the end, he had to evacuate to the roof of his house with his treasured television set (which was more expensive than a car at the time). Even so, the river did not stop rising, and the muddy water came right up to his feet. He said that if it had been just a few dozen centimeters deeper, his whole family would have been swept away and he would have died.
Because of this fear, no matter how small the typhoon was or how far it veered off course, my father never went to sleep until he knew it was completely safe. The reason for the delay in evacuating until this point was that until the Isewan typhoon hit, people of my father’s age had little information about typhoons, and they seemed to have completely underestimated them. They only thought it was a big storm.
In addition, the house where my father lived was in an area that was said to be safe from flooding no matter what kind of damage might occur. This Isewan Typhoon completely destroyed that belief.
Typhoons should not be underestimated.
People of my father’s generation were taught that typhoons are natural disasters because they exceed expectations.
After the water receded, the house where my father was born was covered in sediment and sludge, and it was no longer inhabitable, so it had to be rebuilt. I heard that story every time a typhoon hit, so by the time I can remember, I was already tired of hearing it. On the contrary, it was like listening to a tale from the distant past, and all I could remember was the scene where my father struggled to protect the TV rather than the safe.
It was no wonder, of course. As an elementary school student, I naturally thought that school would be cancelled when a typhoon hit, and I would say, “Please, typhoon, hit us directly. I even prayed in my heart while watching the typhoon news. Just like in the movie “Typhoon Club.
As I grew up, I came to realize that typhoons can cause tremendous damage to society and lead to irreversible situations. However, now that I think about it, I realize that it is also a way of erasing the excitement of childhood with the common sense and decency of an adult.
Of course, I am not saying that we should rejoice with both hands in the arrival of typhoons, but rather that the fact of “becoming an adult” includes the loneliness of losing such sensitivity.
An example of this would be the famous fable of the Naked King. The sensitivity to laugh at what you find funny. That is the privilege of children. I think everyone watched “Ultraman” or “Godzilla” as a child and was simply thrilled to see the monsters destroying the city without any sense of guilt.
But as I grew up, I began to imagine that under the feet of these monsters, that is exactly how many people were supposed to die, either trampled to death or injured.
This childhood feeling of excitement without guilt. When I am doing children’s literature, I sometimes feel lost as to how much I should value it, or whether it should be condemned as a bad thing in the first place.
I hope to create works that do not forget the excitement of childhood, but at the same time do not stifle children’s sensibilities with common sense or common decency. This is what I suddenly thought about when the typhoon arrived. However, the old way of saying the unit of typhoon is millibar rather than hectopascal, which seems to be more frightening.
See you soon.
