{"id":505,"date":"2007-01-14T20:44:11","date_gmt":"2007-01-15T01:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/womantalk.wordpress.com\/2007\/01\/14\/fear-of-typhoons\/"},"modified":"2007-01-14T20:44:11","modified_gmt":"2007-01-15T01:44:11","slug":"fear-of-typhoons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/?p=505","title":{"rendered":"fear of typhoons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is an excerpt from this article<\/a> in today’s NYTimes called “Giants of the Heartland.” It is about a Japanese-American sculptor, Jun Kaneko working in Omaha making gigantic ceramic sculptures. Kaneko related a fascinating account of surviving a typoon in Japan, which he says left him with little fear of anything. It sounds like a fairy tale. It gave me chills to think of a drowning arm grabbing Kaneko’s hand in the pitch blackness.<\/p>\n

“In September 1959, when he was 17, the strongest typhoon ever to hit Japan struck Nagoya, where his family lived. It was the middle of the night, and thousands of people, caught in their sleep, died within minutes.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Did you ever hear of a tatami mat?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well, they float.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I needed a second to grasp the point. The water rose so quickly that people sleeping on the mats found themselves crushed against their own ceilings and drowned. Below sea level, the Kanekos\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 neighborhood consisted mostly of old wood houses, which collapsed, but the Kanekos\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 modest house happened to be concrete, and the family was able to scramble to a small room on the second floor before the water overtook the first one. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There were fish swimming in the living room,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Kaneko remembered.<\/p>\n

The water rose to just below the second-floor windowsill. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And for some reason I decided to stick my hand out the window, into the water,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he continued. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Suddenly \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it was pitch black so I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see anything \u00e2\u20ac\u201d somebody grabbed my hand.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

He pulled. His father, finding a body dragged inside, rushed to the window, stuck his own hand out, and another drowning body latched onto him. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We kept sticking out our hands and pulling them in,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Kaneko said. Altogether they fished 36 strangers from death, later fashioning a raft from debris to go get supplies, and eventually boarding everyone in the house for two months.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is an excerpt from this article in today’s NYTimes called “Giants of the Heartland.” It is about a Japanese-American sculptor, Jun Kaneko working in Omaha making gigantic ceramic sculptures. Kaneko related a fascinating account of surviving a typoon in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}