Emergency broadcast
Sometimes when we have heavy rain I write about hearing the flood warning sirens down the hill at the local river. This is a picture of the loudspeakers in my neighbourhood - the sort of thing that would be an air raid siren during WWII, or in the war movies I grew up with. Despite the Internet and online announcement systems and information platforms and iPhones in nearly everyone’s pocket or purse every neighbourhood in Japan has a public address system like this for emergencies. I sometimes see these loudspeakers atop tall poles and make a note of them, but I usually don’t notice them. They are part of the unsightly overhead clutter of the urban landscape (there's a lot of that) that I’ve grown used to. The emergency address system is tested regularly throughout Japan around 5:00 p.m. every day. In my neighbourhood what happens is that a recorded message is broadcast loudly telling children that it's time to go home. Other neighbourhoods might have different announcements. Whether children take the message and go home or not is not the point. The point is only to test the system every day.
I used to be annoyed, thinking it was stupidly over-indulgent to broadcast a message every day, "It's 5:00! Time for you to go home!" until I finally learned what it really was. Now, it’s another one of a growing list of Japanese things I enjoy (and enjoy explain to my family back home). During episodes of heavy rain, I enjoy listening for flood warnings so that I can scoot out and go have a look at the Kanda River down the hill. In my 29-years living in Tokyo the local river has only flooded once, and that was during a thunderstorm, not a typhoon.