I did a small laundry last week the morning that the typhoon rains began and had to bring the clothes in from the clothesline and hang them inside. This morning when I put on a fleece that had been washed that day it smelled like spoiled milk, and realized that it has been so humid and wet that the fleece never dried thoroughly, what I was smelling was mildew.
We are experiencing the second typhoon of this season in Japan. It has not been an especially severe storm. Okinawa, and Kagoshima, on southern Kyushu, received the brunt of the high winds and driving rain. It began raining here in Chiba almost a week. The winds have been about 40 – 50 km an hour with about 50 cm of rain. It is forecast to stop raining sometime this afternoon. Japanese weather forecasters are about as accurate as American weather forecasters, so we'll see.
Typhoons have been part of the agricultural cycle in Japan. The massive rains flooded the rice fields meaning that agriculture can be conducted a distance away from major rivers. People built canals with small dams to direct the waters. A 19th century social scientist, whose name I forget, referred to societies that depended upon such forces of nature as hydrologic societies. Meaning that the social organization grew in response to the human power needed to harness floods that resulted from typhoons and other weather events. They're part of the natural cycle of our earth and humans adapted to them.
In the States I've seen on the news that tornadoes and other storms have wreaked havoc in the South and Midwest. Hundreds of people have died within a relatively short period of time.
This year thus far we have been reminded that the forces of nature are beyond human control. That is not to say humans do not contribute to the consequences of nature. Human’s, as all sentient beings, area a part of the natural world, integral to the function and results of the cosmos.
The Great East Japan Earthquake (that's the name given to the recent 9.0 earthquake by the Japanese government) and resulting tsunami was a natural phenomenon that shapes the earth and has since the earth began. Architects and engineers have gotten pretty good at building structures to withstand severe earthquakes. Damage from the earthquakes themselves occurs primarily in older structures. It was human hubris that did not heed the warnings of previous generations of Japanese and located towns, villages, and a nuclear power plant too close to the sea.
When we lose our respect for the forces of nature we pay the consequences, whether it is the loss of life in the American South or in the Tohoku region of Japan.
Gassho . . .
Monshin
Thank you for your thoughts and observations.
I know you would never blame the victims of any tragedy for their own downfall, so I know you did not meant to imply that flood and tornado victims died due to a lack of respect for natural forces. Respected or not, those forces are sometimes great enough to kill people because we cannot get out of the way. I appreciate that we modern humans can become so enamored of our intelligence and technology — shaping the earth to meet our needs and desires — that we can forget that we should work with nature as well as shape it if we want to stay safe. Yet even when we do so, sometimes nature's power is too much for us.
In Peace,
Monko
It is amazing how doing something as basic as laundry, the traditional way, can be such as learning experience. We separate ourselves from nature when we become used to conveniences like washing machines and dryers. We need more opportunity to learn to live WITH nature, not fooling ourselves that we've mastered it.
Monshin, this post was particularly relevant for me because we recently had a local example of the forces of nature being beyond human control. We were hit by an EF3 tornado in Springfield on Wednesday. Nick and I live in the neighborhood where some of the worst damage happened. We escaped with relatively little damage, but a block away whole houses were leveled. Fortunately, unlike the other disasters you mentioned, there were very few lives lost in this one. And, the tornado has provided a chance for the community to practice compassion as everyone has come together to help each other recover from the storm.