Photo/Illutration Residents are rescued by firefighters in Kawasaki's Takatsu Ward on Oct. 13 after the area was flooded by Typhoon No. 19. (The Asahi Shimbun)

The impact of Typhoon No. 19 was evident all around me on the afternoon of Oct. 13, when I walked around a residential area in Kawasaki’s Takatsu Ward near the Tamagawa river.

Amid the noisy sounds of drainage pumps, residents were busy hauling cupboards, refrigerators and other household items out of their flooded homes.

A man in his 40s said, “I woke up early on the third floor of my home, went downstairs and found a sofa bobbing in the water on the first floor. It was the first time the first floor ever got flooded.”

Under the glorious post-typhoon autumn sky, the man sighed in resignation as he resumed the seemingly interminable drudgery of rinsing mud off his possessions.

This neighborhood is at the confluence of Tamagawa and its tributary, the Hirasegawa river. Most of the residents in the area were safe, but a man in his 60s died in his flooded first-floor apartment.

The typhoon's torrential rains and high winds wreaked havoc in most of eastern Japan before it barreled through to the Pacific Ocean.

A surprisingly large number of rivers overflowed and flooded. Aside from well-known rivers such as the Tamagawa, Chikumagawa and Abukumagawa, there also were names I had never come across through work or travel, such as the Tokigawa, Oppegawa, Akiyamagawa and Tsukumogawa.

The Japan Meteorological Agency’s hazard distribution map shows the risk levels of flooding in purple, red and yellow. The map covers about 21,000 midsize and small rivers nationwide, and I could locate the Hirasegawa in Kawasaki.

As I searched the flooded rivers on this map, the network of countless rivers began to look like capillaries covering the Japanese archipelago.

Photos and videos taken by my colleagues around the nation show a family waving a cloth from a rooftop, an elderly citizen being rescued by a Self-Defense Forces helicopter, and a woman being transported on a fire station boat.

The flooding occurred at so many locations that just looking at these images gave me no clues as to where each picture was taken.

We are definitely witnessing a deluge of historic proportions.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Oct. 14

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.