The reason for ANA and JAL cancelling all flights in Narita on the 13th is not the airport operations as such that is the cause. Cargo planes are arriving. I also see Scandinavian Airlines coming in to Narita, but that is just about the only European airline coming in today.

What a convincing rebuttal,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/scotland/50028137
The Scotland vs Japan Rugby Match is to go ahead today in Yokohama

I agree.
And condolences to the families of those who died yesterday due to the typhoon.

And condolences to the families of those who died because they couldn't get timely medical services because the transport system was shut down. And condolences to the 50 families of those who died due to bath tab drownings in Japan yesterday because the government failed do take the precaution of shutting down the water system.

"Safety first" sounds great, but that's not the way people or societies actually make decisions.

Ever been inside a Japanese factory? Or more broadly, a factory in a developed country? It's all about 安全第一 and the numbers show it. Here is a little piece of data to back that up: Since 1984, 14 people have been killed by robots in the US. In 2016 alone, more than 34,000 people died in car accidents in the US. So yes, in some domains, that's how decisions are made.

Whether a human life is worth that much is a different question.

Extensive water damage across many prefectures.

In Tokyo Metropolitan area alone more than 240,000 homes are still without power as of this hour.

1. Fatality rates for occupational accidents adjusted for GDP is lower in the U.S. than in Japan if you exclude on the job auto accidents (American workers drive further and faster while on the job.) If you further exclude acts of violence and self-inflicted drug overdoses, the U.S. workplace is safer even on per worker basis.

2. I look at factory accident rates every month as part of my work. Accident rates in U.S. factories have dropped dramatically over the last 50 years. Not because of safety first but because companies are rational and the benefit to cost ratio from safety precautions in the work place is very high.

3. Adjusting for miles driven the auto-accident fatality rate is only slightly higher in the U.S. than in Japan. If you were to adjust for average speed driven, American roads are far, far safer than Japanese roads at any given speed.

Not Tokyo. Kanto yes. Tokyo is like a few thousand. And 250k as a percentage for all of Kanto is comparable to what you get with a thunderstorm in the U.S.

And you had the highest level of heavy rain warning ever issued throughout the entire Kanto area, including the all-important Metropolitan Tokyo area.

But I suppose the JMA was just reacting hysterically due to media influence.

This makes no sense unless the cost of an injury or death is so high (from downtime costs to legal liabilities) that you'd be willing to worry (and spend) a lot on safety to avoid it. Which is the same thing as saying 安全第一. And this is consistent with your statements that factories in the US are safer than in Japan (which I'd be willing to believe), simply from the fact that legal liabilities from accidental injury or death are probably way higher in the US than in Japan.

In the case of the JMA, they could be all cavalier about it and it turns out to be a catastrophe. They'd be in way more hot water than if they listened to you and the typhoon turned out to be a damp squib.

The dollar cost for occupational injury is mostly medical (most companies self-insure health care for their employees) and the cost of the loss of a skilled worker. Liability is covered by workmen's comp. More than the dollar cost though, I'd say the emotional cost of having a friend or colleague get hurt or killed is what drives a lot of the decision making. Plus safety is generally very cheap to implement.

IMHO, JMA is usually pretty good on the warnings, but when the media goes berserk it forces them to be to be overly cautious. In the most recent case, the media was publishing outright lies about Hagibis and it left the JMA no room for good decision making.

I know I am looking at a fairly small area of central Tokyo by what I can see from my 14th floor home. But I was actually surprised that we did not get more rain based on the warnings that were issued. I need to see if I can find a rain gauge for this area and get an actual statistic for how much rain we actually got yesterday. I have seen worse.

Actually it looks like the flooding and loss of life outside of Tokyo was much more severe than it first appeared. Hardly a "nothing-burger." Many of my earlier comments were inappropriate and I apologize to my fellow FT-ers.

The rainfall was erratic, not like a big blanket of rain covering everything equally. You might see quite a difference between places just over 10km apart.

The worst part of this storm was the heavy rain in the mountains (Hakone got over one meter of rain in a 48 hour period), which caused the associated rivers to swell, which caused rivers to overflow their banks in 14 areas, and caused three breaks in the embankments. That's what has caused the majority of death associated with this storm thus far.