Typhoon Hagibis: Normal service in Tokyo as storm draws closer

It was PG Wodehouse who noted that it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. That has never been as relevant as around Tokyo this weekend, where, as of Saturday morning, Scotland’s vital World Cup game against Japan hangs by a very slender thread due to the impending storm which is predicted to reach the mainland late on Saturday afternoon.

Typhoon Hagibis remains on course to reach southeast coast of Honshu, the main island in Japan, with Tokyo and surrounding areas anticipating wind gusts of 225 kph and record rainfall. Nippon Airways and Japan Airwaves have already announced the suspension of some 900 flights to and from the Tokyo region on Saturday while East Japan railway company has issued a statement that it will suspend its services from 9am on Saturday morning. When Typhoon Faxai caused widespread damage in the Chiba area of Kanto last month, the transport companies were criticised for not giving sufficient notice before cancelling their services. They have been actively monitoring the approach of the typhoon since Wednesday. Hundreds of thousands of homes damaged in the Chiba area remain vulnerable to the impact of the latest typhoon, which is falling on a Japanese ‘long weekend.’

City officials have urged hospitals and public authorities to check on backup monitor supplies and warned the 38 million residents of the greater Tokyo area to stock up on supplies and to consider leaving vulnerable coastal areas.

While international reports speak of Japan ‘bracing’ itself for the arrival of what would be the 19th typhoon of the season, there was no evidence of anything out of the ordinary in central Tokyo on Friday evening, where the restaurants and shopping outlets were as busy as ever. Just-arrived tourists continued to wheel cases through the busy streets. Several of those had probably reached Tokyo to attend the game which has caused a typhoon of its own for World Rugby: the Japan-Scotland game, scheduled for Yokohama on Sunday evening.

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By then, the meteorological pathway charts the storm as having passed through the region. And all of the forecasts are necessarily ambivalent. At the beginning of the week, the expectation was that Hagibis would strike the western coast of Japan, where Ireland play Samoa on Saturday. Instead, it shifted path dramatically. Even as it approaches Tokyo, Japan’s meteorological office dispatches stressed that the typhoon might bypass land completely.

However, agency official Yasushi Kakihara said on Friday that the anticipated typhoon had the potential to match the rainfall of the 1958 Kanogawa storm, which caused over 1,000 deaths across the Kanto and Shizuoka regions and untold damages. The precautionary and infrastructural expertise has improved incrementally since then but the potential damaged caused by the storm remains guesswork.

It’s against this backdrop that Scotland’s increasingly threatened World Cup rugby ambitions are being played out. The prospect of up to 60,000 fans moving through Tokyo and Yokohama in the wake of such a volatile and unpredictable storm is alarming. Scottish rugby’s hopes, as voiced by coach Gregor Townsend on Thursday, that the game could be postponed or played behind closed doors, seem unlikely to materialise. The best hope was that Hagibis, unlike any other entity in Japan, might decide to do the Scots a favour at the last moment.