A “supertyphoon” is heading for Okinawa, Kyushu and the Korean Peninsula:

Typhoon Nabi, which is more powerful than Typhoon Rusa in 2002, which caused the worst damage to Korea, is likely to hit the Korean peninsula around September 6 or 7.

The Korea Meteorological Administration (KMT) announced yesterday, “As of noon on September 2, the 14th typhoon of the season which emerged around 1,210km away near the northeastern sea of Guam around at 9:00 p.m. on August 29 is slowly moving northwestward at 17km speed per hour along the 1,600 km southeastern sea of Okinawa in Japan.”

In August, 2002, Typhoon Rusa killed about a 113 people in South Korea.

I remember that summer for being rainy and cool, with temperatures spiking up dramatically overnight at the end of August, as Rusa slammed into Korea. One day it was 20 degrees or so. The next day it was 35, and it stayed hot for the entire month of September.

Thanks to the cool, rainy summer and then a month of baking autumn heat, there was just a ton of goldenrod (seitaka-awadachi-sou, in Japanese) that Fall.

Towards the end of September I would start waking up at night, unable to breath, and I would start getting similar attacks throughout the day.

I went to the doctor, who diagnosed me with adult-onset asthma. Asthma can be triggered by sudden extreme changes in temperature, and all that goldenrod probably didn’t help, either.

Thanks, Typhoon Rusa.

Update:
Looks as though Typhoon Nabi (or Typhoon No. 14, as the imagination-impaired Japanese weather people are calling it) is going to hold off on visiting Korea, and will probably pummel Japan instead. Perhaps it has something to do with those textbooks…

A quick check of the Japanese-language news sites indicates that this storm isn’t receiving nearly as much attention from the media as the typhoon that was predicted to hit Tokyo last week, which probably just proves Ampontan’s point:

The Japanese news media and the people who live in the Kanto area think they are “all of Japan”, and behave that way. When a typhoon hits Kyushu, it’s reported as if it were a typhoon in the Philippines. Oh, yeah, a typhoon, next story…

When a typhoon hits Tokyo, the media gets in a tizzy three days in advance and it’s the lead story on the national news.