Japan has always been a disaster-prone country, but in recent years, the number of disasters has been unusually high, especially in the summer. The idea that “summer = disaster” has become established. This summer in particular has seen a series of typhoons, forcing people to be on edge around the clock.
Typhoons increase from July to October, so we need to be careful for the next two months. It’s annoying, but we have no choice but to raise our disaster prevention awareness and act as calmly as possible.
I have always thought that disasters like typhoons only threaten the lives of the people and do more harm than good, but one day, a simple question suddenly came to mind.
“It’s true that typhoons do more harm than good, but can’t we find some kind of benefit and use it to improve the national interest and the lives of the people?”
When I searched for “typhoon, benefit” on the Internet, I found examples such as “supporting water resources through heavy rainfall” and “resolving water shortages.” Anyone can think of this, but on further investigation, I found that “Typhoons stir up the warm water near the ocean surface and the cold water deep in the ocean, which results in a drop in the temperature of the water near the surface, helping to maintain the ecosystem.” It seems that corals are particularly benefiting from this.
Typhoons have their own benefits, and they do not necessarily have more disadvantages than advantages, but are there benefits that can be more directly linked to improving the lives of the people? For example, if there was technology that could efficiently convert the strong winds of a typhoon into energy and store it, it would lead to an improvement in the lives of the people.
When I looked into whether there were other people who were thinking about this, I found that there were actually quite a few.
Take, for example, Yokohama National University’s “Typhoon Shot Concept.” The idea is to control the force of a typhoon and extract the energy to transform the “threat” of a typhoon into a “blessing.” Research and development is apparently underway with the goal of realizing this by 2050.
It’s interesting. I hope that we can come up with more ideas that turn challenges into benefits. (Kei Kitajima)

※Translating Japanese articles into English with AI