More Asia news
Florida isn’t the only place being hammered by bad weather. Typhoon 15 has been pounding western Japan; 5 people have been killed and 2 are missing. Actually, that was as of 6 p.m., so the number may be higher now. Luckily, Atsushi’s city is getting wind and rain but is on the periphery of the storm. Let’s hope there are no more casualties. Japan is, of course, mountainous; many areas are prone to mudslides.
Speaking of destructive forces, the juche ideal is doing its usual sterling job of keeping the people of North Korea fed and secure…so much so that yet again, 15 people have entered the South Korean embassy in Beijing seeking asylum. (BTW, there’s a word for escaping from North Korea that…I think it existed before, but I’ve never seen it used in Japanese newspapers to refer to anything else: 脱北 [“escape to the north”]. Desperation to get out of that hellhole is such a fixture of the news that it essentially has its own dedicated kanji compound.)