Four Days' Rain

For four days and four nights, it had rained in Kyushu. A swirling, kingdom-come downpour streamed down the mountain spine to the narrow coastal plain, spilling out the tiny rivers into a torrent of yellow foam; it took the huts and the houses, the roads and the railroads, the bridges and the viaducts; it brought down landslides to crush the upland villages. Countless thousands were marooned on islands of high ground, perched in quivering treetops, watching and fearful as the mud-churning waters flowed past. Rubbing her prayer beads, an old lady said: "I have lived a long time, but I have never seen anything like this."

In four days and four nights, twelve inches of rain had fallen, with a recorded peak of 21 inches at Hita, Oita Prefecture. The toll: 457 known dead, 1,114 missing, 901 injured; some 800,000 homeless; 4,000 homes destroyed or washed away, 300,000 homes damaged or flooded, 350,000 acres of rich paddy and upland fields ruined and gone. The cost: $50 million to $100 million. For Kyushu, where it rains twice as much as it does elsewhere in Japan, it was the worst flood catastrophe in 61 years.

Japanese policemen and civilians, U.S. servicemen in helicopters worked tired-eyed through the blinding rain, to rescue the living and remove the dead. The Japanese who escaped huddled cowed in their temples, in school and farm houses on the high ground, or numbly around radios that said: ". . . At least two' more days of rain."

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