Since last night, the rain has been falling steadily—by the time the morning commute rolled around, it had turned into a downpour.
It was the first time in a while that I needed to bring out my long umbrella.
With the autumn rains come heavier precipitation, and the looming threat of typhoons makes this season all the more unpredictable.
In recent years, rain has been far from gentle—more often than not, it arrives in disaster-level proportions.
That’s why I sincerely hope flood control and infrastructure measures are taken more seriously.
Despite the fact that we face these disasters almost every year, our responses are still reactive and delayed.
Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that a government official once advised a minister that “preparing for a once-in-a-millennium disaster is unnecessary.”
Watching these torrential rains, it feels less like “rain is falling” and more like “water is pouring from the sky.”
It’s as if a god beyond the clouds is scattering enormous droplets, and year by year, those droplets seem to grow in size.
Maybe it's just a divine whim—but still, it wouldn’t hurt if they showed a little restraint.
And yet, despite having such an abundance of water, this country lets most of it simply flow out to sea.
Whenever I see the dusty images from Palestine, I’m reminded of just how precious water truly is.
Recently, I read an article about how deserts are spreading in Romania.
There are places all over the world where water is in desperately short supply.
Japan may not always remain a “water-rich nation.”
Perhaps the reason rain falls so frequently over these islands now is nothing more than a temporary climate pattern.
Being surrounded by seas on all sides and having endured water-related hardship in the past does not mean we can remain complacent.
We must not assume that abundance will last forever.
The value of water is rising, and we now face the unsettling reality that even our water sources are being purchased by foreign entities.
Globalization has quietly seeped into all the things we once took for granted as inherently Japanese.
Now, more than ever, we must pay attention to the small things—because it’s in those details that what we need to protect may be quietly slipping away.
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