This is not my first super typhoon, this is 10th if you count hurricanes.  I strategically purchase property that is naturally fortified, and our 100 year old kominka (古民家) in Niigata, reaps the benefits of what is known as "the Sado Island effect." In winter, snow flies right over us and lands 10 km inland, and when typhoons hit Sado Island which lies 32 km out to sea directly in front of our hamlet, Sado Island takes the brunt of the storm. Also, our local beach is growing, not eroding, and this is also due to the "Sado Island effect." And I take extra precautions, food, supplies, fuel, water about enough to last a month.  Also, I never read the newspaper weather, or listen to radio or tv weather reports.  Daily, I read weather charts, in order to know well in advance what to bring along on my family or business outings, or if we need to do some shopping and bunker down for a few days.  And this is a practice I do extra-diligently when leading any Japan photography workshop tours.   This reminds me of when Super Typhoon Etau slammed into the Kanto region of Japan in September 2015 while I was leading my annual Nikko photo workshop tour.  I often look back at these times and share my stories in the hope it will educate tourists, fellow adventurers, and locals on safety protocols when time is sensitive on an impending possible natural disaster.  Sadly, most do not practice the due diligence required to keep themselves or their participants safe, and they rely on hotel staff.  Wow?  Hotel staff? Or they rely on run of the mill tour guides, or, even worse, they listen to regular TV or radio announcers who are hundreds of kms away in Tokyo.  If I need advice, I proceed to the closest emergency services center, fire hall, or police station.

After checking out, I drove the lead SUV to the main fire hall, and everything was suspiciously still.  As an ex-rescue specialist, I was a little shocked not to see rescuers milling about getting ready for armageddon.  My team and I got out of our vehicles, and we talked to the fire/rescue chief head of Nikko's FDMA, Fire, and Disaster Management Agency and his team.  I asked, "So, what do you recommend we do?" They were overwhelmed and more than helpful because someone had the good sense to ask about the correct course of action.  The chief showed me the weather charts and the course of the super typhoon approaching.  We could see that there was only a small window of time to get from Nikko to Tokyo before people would be stranded in transit.  The highways were soon to be clogged with hundreds of thousands of tourists who were all going in the wrong direction. The aerial photo below shows only one small section of highway in the region where the river water had overflowed the roads, making them impassible.  In fact, there were now 10 km lakes in many areas where there hadn't been any before.  Over 50% of those who had fled Nikko in the morning were stranded in vehicles; the lucky ones were stranded at roadside rest stops.  It took three days for the waters to recede, and the rest stops were not sufficiently equipped to handle such an influx of people, so sewers became quickly backed up, and there was no power or running water.  The stranded tourists were not even able to pump gas into their cars to run their air conditioning in the hot and humid summer weather.  Helicopters flew in supplies and portable toilets to address the mounting problem.  Emergency services helicopters plucked stranded residents from roofs after waters surged over a wide area when the raging Kinugawa river burst its banks in Joso, north of Tokyo, swamping the city of 65,000 people and cutting off the highways, see image below.

Rewind three days, I took the fire chiefs advice and checked into another lodging in Nikko, and we weathered the storm comfortably. The next day the storm was still raging but we went out to photograph, and in all my years visiting and photographing  in Nikko for UNESCO I have never seen Nikko so empty, it was like a ghost town.  Then in the afternoon the storm cleared, we had blue skies.  We spend another night in Nikko, then the next day we departed and drove though the mountain ranges to visit with the snow monkeys.  Meanwhile on the highways to Tokyo tourists who foolishly evacuated Nikko, including run of the mill guided tours, with licensed tour guides were still stranded for another day.

As a final word of caution, if you want to take a Japan photography workshop tour safely, or any photo tour worldwide, make sure you travel with an experienced adventurer who has an entire team and is a local to the region or has scouted the area for at least three to five years and not three to five days.  Your leader should understand the region's topography weather patterns for the four seasons and know emergency evacuation procedures, and be prepared for anything that could happen to make your trip carefree.