I was discovering neither my jacket nor shoes were even vaguely waterproof. The rain was lashing so hard that I had to hold the umbrella in two hands, with my wet fingers clasping the plastic canopy to stop it turning inside out. Beneath this plastic shield, the backpack I was wearing across my chest yowled a protest.

Which was frankly a bit rich, since I was wrestling the umbrella for her benefit. Also, this was my second walk in the typhoon that was predicted to be the most powerful storm on record to hit the Greater Tokyo area.

The rain for Typhoon Hagibis has begun on Friday afternoon, following two days of cloudless blue skies shrieking outright lies about what was around the temporal corner. The national news was warning everyone to prepare for the weekend by Friday night. Trains would become steadily more infrequent over Saturday morning and stop completely around lunchtime. All events scheduled for the Saturday throughout the city were cancelled, including two matches for the Rugby World Cup.

Tycoon fears in Japan 😱 #RWC2019 @standardnews pic.twitter.com/7p3Vl4CsLZ
— Robert Smith (@OnyaDon) October 10, 2019

(The latter involved an England match, leading to copious complaints that twitter suggested might stem from a slight misunderstanding →)

Work made an announcement on the loud speaker that we should consider leaving on time. Also, they wouldn’t take responsible for cars crushed to smithereens on campus. And for the love of all that is holy, shut your office windows (with a postscript that they might leak anyway).

I covered my computer monitors in bubble wrap and headed for the supermarket.

The shelves were empty.

I’d actually done my grocery shopping for the weekend earlier in the week, but fuelled with warnings that Japan might never have electricity again, I thought I’d pick up a few more things I could eat cold.

There were none.

The shelf for bread was completely bare, as were many of the counters for fish, noodles and fruit. The queue to buy what remained wrapped around the store.

I posted a photo on twitter, decided no one had explicitly told me never to eat the potatoes I’d bought earlier raw and headed for home.

BREEEEAAAAADDDDD! (Or fish or noodles or … anything.)

The rain poured down through Saturday, water logging the grass outside and making the occasional odd whistling noise when the wind gusted at the windows. I re-investigated the contents of a disaster preparation kit I’d bought off Amazon a year or so ago and tried not to eat all the snacks I had managed to find for the eventuality that the power went out.

I relayed this to my parents when they texted late that afternoon.

“Your disaster kit probably contains different things from most people,” they told me. “You’ve probably replaced a bottle of water with your laptop and mobile phone.”

This accusation was utterly unfair but… I eyed the contents of the disaster kit. It did lack a spare battery for my laptop. Another hour was filled building a secondary evacuation kit.

Then the alerts started on my phone.

These emergency alerts warn of impending disaster near your area. In an effort to ensure these are heard, I secretly suspect that such individual beacons may be a non-insignificant cause of death during any natural disaster. Should your internal organs survive their call, a secondary drawback is that they cover quite a wide area. This means it’s not possible to tell whether you’re definitely in the affected region. The twitter feed for my local city council suffered from similar problems, noting that if you did not know whether you were in the disaster target area, you should check the TV or the internet… without providing links.

These notices did state that sirens would sound in your area if you had to evacuate. Japanese towns and cities are littered with loud speakers that reassuringly chime at 5pm to tell you that all is well and that kids should go home for dinner. I confess I find this disconcertingly like the scene in ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ that depicts a suburb of identical houses where kids bounce a ball perfectly in-sync before being summoned simultaneously inside by their mother.

So, a little creepy.

But it meant we had sirens.

However, these did not sound. Instead, a truck rolled around the streets outside shouting words I could not fully catch. I caught “心配” meaning “worry” but not the context.

Should I worry and run?

Should I be prepared to worry but stay put and hide under the bed?

Or was there nothing to worry about and I should stop being a pansy?

You’d think at this juncture that my neighbours might have been an indication of whether I should evacuate.

But they weren’t.

That’s the thing about Japanese culture: the whole neighbourhood could be thrown into the shadow of a giant Godzilla and everyone would calmly gather their pre-prepared Godzilla disaster bag and head for the streets without so much as a whimper.

Early Saturday afternoon in Typhoon Hagibis. The full force came that evening.

The lights in the building opposite suggested I was not alone in the neighbourhood, but were these people acting on the official advice or were they a group of disaster bag-denying loonies? There was no way to know.

What seemed to be lacking was a Government run interactive map, where you could enter your address and see the official alert level for your location. In the end I did find a Yahoo map that did exactly this, although later inspection suggested it was not completely in-sync with the phone alerts in different areas.

However, that map told me the time had come to run.

Further poking around found an additional online alert issued by my city council saying my street had been was now “Level 4” and the advise was to evacuate.

The different levels refer to the recently updated disaster warning system that had been rolled out nationwide to replace a previous system in which the Japan Meteorological Agency and local governments issued their own (not always consistent) warnings. The idea was to encourage people to get off their butts and out their building when disaster struck, rather than opting to believe the lowest of the warnings issued.

The system has five levels where Level 4 corresponds to an evacuation order. Level 5 is denoted the point where several disasters have already occurred. I think this might be the polite way of telling you that you are already dead and to please look for a new authority on all future matters.

The evacuation point for me was a nearby school. I had double-checked this earlier in the day, but actually knew the location due to cunning signs that donned the outside of the sturdy concrete structure. What I didn’t know was whether they took cats.

I peeked outside.

It was dark and wet. But not heavily flooded. I decided to walk to the school and ask about pets. En-route, I gazed up at the buildings of my neighbourhood. A few lights were on, but they tended to be on higher floors than my ground floor apartment. As I turned a corner, I saw a woman standing with two little boys who were splashing unconcernedly in puddles. Gathering up my best Japanese, I approached and bobbed a half-bow in a standard greeting.

“I’m sorry my Japanese is not good,” I began (in Japanese). “But is this area safe?”

“Ah…,” was the reply. “Yes, it’s difficult to say.”

She announced this with remarkable unconcern. As the rain lashed through the dark around us, I began to feel I was part of an Ghibli movie where the heroine meets strange people in the dead of night who give confusing messages. I tried to remember how many of those protagonists survived. With a thank you, I hurried down the street towards the school.

Where mercifully I was met with bright lights and the less creepy end of Japanese efficiency.

“Pets are no problem,” I was told by a student who very kindly spoke to me in English. “Come and see!”

He led me down a set of stairs to the ground floor of the building, where I could see a line of dog and cat carriers, with a few anxious owners bending over the confined inhabitants. I could have hugged my guide but that would have been both socially inappropriate and poor repayment, since I was soaked. Looking around the school, I also realised something important: I was going to need slippers.

Slippers are actually listed on the disaster preparation sheet I had received a while ago from the city council. I had laughed out loud and scared the cat.

It is true that Japan is a bit obsessed with slippers. Shoes come off at the front door and slippers go on. There are separate slippers for going to the bathroom and travel slippers to wear on aeroplanes. I confess to kicking my shoes off at the entrance to my apartment and then free-sock’ing the situation from there on in. No doubt I am partially to blame for Japan suspecting all foreigners are nethanderals. But there was a difference between an apartment and the corridors and bathrooms of a school: walking around in socks was not going to be comfortable or particularly hygienic.

Upon returning home, I merged my disaster kits. No bottles of water were abandoned! I just picked a larger bag. I adjusted the cat’s backpack carrier so that the front panel had an impervious plastic bubble window. It looked a little like a submarine, which was appropriate. My provisions went on my back. Tallis in her cat backpack hung from my front. Her face said it all.

Donned in waterproof trousers, rain jacket and umbrella, I battled back to the school. There was one fairly nasty moment on the school steps where a gust of wind caught the umbrella and nearly threw us to the ground, but I managed to close the plastic horror and tumble through the doors.

Pets were on the ground floor —it was explained to me— but humans were on the second floor. I was not entirely comfortable with that situation, as the ground floor was at risk of flooding. However, when I brought Tallis in her carrier down to the ground floor, I found I was not the only person who had decided to “forget” to go back up to the designated people level and instead stay with their furry friends. No one seemed to protest.

After peeling off my waterproofs and scratching Tallis behind the ears, I made a brief reconnaissance of the school. The second floor classrooms had people sprawled on the floor, chairs and desks, all watching a large TV that stood in the corner of each room. Each screen showed the national news from NHK, which had a live feed of the floods.

All the evacuees over about 60 years old seemed to have included full nightwear in their disaster pack, and were looking as prepared for bed as if this had been an elegant guest house. I felt absolved of bringing my laptop.

Everyone was offered one tough woollen blanket, pulled from plastic foil where presumable they are stored at the school until needed. I accepted a blanket from an assistant, promising faithfully I hadn’t taken one already, and brought it back to the ground floor to sit with Tallis.

Tallis was a trooper, sitting quietly in her open carrier and watching the people and pets around us.

A bit further down our corridor, a small dog was yapping wildly in its carrier. I was regretfully contemplating that I might have to eat it, when its owner appeared and realised the problem. She resigned herself to sitting on the floor to offer ongoing moral support.

Next to where Tallis and I were squatting was a pet cage containing two little white dogs. The pair seemed to have no problem with anyone right until they spotted a Frenchie at the other end of the corridor, whereupon they swore a death oath and periodically renewed this vow throughout the night.

Later in the evening, a man appeared leading a Shiba. A Poodle took deep exception to him, barking wildly every time he passed. The anger seemed to be entirely directed at the man, not the dog, which might have been due to his state of dress. Possibly because he had been soaking coming in, this individual had abandoned most of his clothes except for a white tee-shirt, his government issued blanket and flip-flops (although I mercifully can’t confirm if he was wearing shorts or not).

The storm reached its peak between 8pm - 9pm, slamming against the doors and windows of the school. I sat and watched the NHK news on my phone, which had an international version of their live feed dubbed into English. Despite struggling to determine exactly if and when I should evacuate, I really appreciated the English information available, especially that provided for the live feed by NHK. Overall, the total information issued to residents was vast, with TV, social media, phone alerts and broadcasting vans all offering updates on the situation.

Around 9:30pm, water had to be discharged from dams in the area that were at a risk of overflowing, and the river nearest me had burst its banks. Situated on the ground floor, this meant my apartment was in serious risk of being flooded. But since I had the only really non-replaceable item with me (the cat), there was little to do except wait and hope.

As the typhoon moved over us and passed on, an eerie silence fell around the school. We were advised delayed river flooding was still possible and to stay put for a while longer. I left about 12:30am, walking through the soaked and empty streets that felt like a ghost town.

My apartment was fine. The cat clearly wondered why the hell we had left. The answer to that question came about an hour later, when more loud sirens woke me from sleep. Pulling on my still soaked coat, I stumbled out onto the street to find one of my neighbours looking down the road.

“Is it OK?” I asked her. “Is our apartment building safe?”

“Oh, it’s fine,” she assured me. “The problem is over there.” She pointed down the street to indicate the sirens were from arriving emergency vehicles, not general alarms.

I learned later that the streets just down from us had flooded to a level at least waist-high deep. So while we were fine, I’m glad we evacuated when we did.

The following morning appeared with bright sunshine and a gentle breeze. I felt like I’d been run-over by a truck.