JAPAN: Juggernaut of Air

Japan’s chief island of Honshu is shaped like a huge-headed dragon swooping southwestward and snapping at the two smaller islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. One night last week a gentle breeze from the North Pacific was wafting across the two little islands and into the dragon’s maw. At 4 o’clock the next morning a juggernaut of air hit, without warning, the frail little houses that crowd the southern tip of Japan.

It was September, the dread typhoon season. The late rice was in flower. The typhoon, striking at 60 m. p. h. and increasing to 120 m. p. h., headed straight into the dragon’s throat where are the great tea plantations, the textile and munitions factories of Japan’s second largest city, Osaka, the great port of Kobe, and ancient imperial Kyoto. These are three of Japan’s five biggest cities.

The typhoon reached Osaka Bay six hours later, after the girls in their blue serge uniforms and the boys in blue and grey had gone to school. It tumbled down 77 primary schools in Osaka Prefecture, crushing 310 school children to death. It tugged down small skyscrapers. It swept away wood-&-paper houses like rubbish. An hour later it was gone, northward, but behind it came a tidal wave, to flood Osaka, Kobe and the carpet port of Sakai. It swept over a leper hospital and drowned 200, over an insane asylum and drowned 50. It tossed the 4,000-ton Batavia Maru onto a wharf, jammed the Ural Maru up a stone-curbed canal and drove the Zuiho Maru into the Customs House. As Osaka citizens fled past the Iron Works toward higher ground, the pursuing water tried to drown the red-hot blast furnaces. The explosion killed a score, injured 100.

Screaming northeast, the Taifu swept on Kyoto, tumbled 17 more flimsy primary schools, of which one caught fire and incinerated the children. Then it curved toward the north, narrowly missed shivering Tokyo, and spent itself in, the Sea of Japan.

Casualties: 1,661 dead, 5,414 injured, 250,000 homeless. Damages: $250,000,000.

A major catastrophe always seems to follow Japan’s acquisition of new land. After the Sino-Japanese War, which added Formosa, the Pescadores Islands, and the puppet Kingdom of Korea to the Empire of the Rising Sun, the earthquake of 1896 killed 27,102. After the Russo-Japanese War and the acquisition of Port Arthur, the Kwantung Peninsula and the southern half of Sakhalin, the Formosa earthquake of 1906 killed 1,228. After the Treaty of Versailles gave Japan a precious bagful of Pacific Island mandates, came the terrible earthquake of 1923 which killed 91,344. And three years ago Japan grabbed Manchukuo.