Last weekend was the annual festival at Oyama Fudoson, where the seven local villages carry their portable shrines up the mountain to pray for rain to swell the rice before harvest. I think those prayers may have worked too well (but too late) this year.
A couple weeks ago the JMA made its three month prediction for the typhoon season. They said that the Pacific region would see fewer storms overall from August through October, but that Japan would get hit by more than usual.
And so it seems to be that their prediction is coming true. At least this week.
- Typhoon #5 (aka Maria) passed over the northern part of Japan last night, dumping 100mm of rain and downgrading to a tropical storm around 3 am.
- Typhoon #6 is hot on its heels, also heading north but not so strong.
- Typhoon #7 is going to be a big one, currently predicted to slam Tokyo (and us) on Friday.
- And today at noon, a tropical depression appeared. That might blow up into Typhoon #8, but it’s not so big right now.
Typhoons are bad for rice farmers. Wind flattens the stalks while heavy rain turns the clay fields to sticky mush. Both of those things make harvest significantly more challenging.
The rice matured so fast in this year’s blistering hot rainless summer that the harvest schedule at Oyama Senmaida has been brought forward by a week. The first harvest activity is scheduled for this Saturday – the day after Typhoon #7.
I imagine we will be preparing frantically and I will be learning a lot more about farming and harvest than I wanted to. I am on the schedule for winnowing straw for rope making before the weekend but it might need to be all hands on deck to help the owners get the rice in.
On top of the typhoons, we are currently five days into a week-long special alert for a possible Nankai Trough Mega-Quake. Hmmm. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence linking typhoons and earthquakes. Science says it’s not true, but let’s see what happens.
