JAPAN: Ida’s Price

Roaring north out of the Pacific last week came the worst storm to hit Japan in 24 years. In twelve dreadful hours, Typhoon Ida swept clear up the northern half of Honshu, Japan’s biggest and richest island. The torrential rains caused widespread floods and some 1,900 landslides, left half a million homeless. In Tokyo the Emperor’s 300 cherished carp were flushed out of the Imperial Palace moat into surrounding streets. (Tokyo cops, splashing in hot pursuit, saved most of the carp as well as the Imperial swans.) On the “Japanese Riviera”—the mountainous Izu Peninsula southwest of Tokyo —two tiny coastal villages were washed out to sea and a dozen more engulfed by the swollen waters of the Kano River. Early this week, with the full extent of the damage still unknown, Japanese police estimated the nation’s casualties at 337 dead, 984 missing.