Heavy rains and floods have swept across Kyushu, forcing evacuation advisories for more than three million people across Kumamoto and six other prefectures, with about 384,000 residents in Kumamoto under the highest warning. The downpours spawned floods and landslides; rivers swollen enough to sweep away vehicles and damage roads. Tamana logged a regional rainfall record of over 37 cm, and in several areas homes, shops, and cars were submerged up to a meter. Rescue teams searched for three missing people in Kumamoto after a mudslide struck a three-member family; two were rescued, one remains unaccounted for. In Kagoshima, four were injured and one missing. Train services between Kagoshima and Hakata and other local lines were halted, and about 6,000 households lost power. This calamity follows weeks of extreme heat, with June and July the hottest on record and early August bringing further record temperatures; authorities note more than 53,000 people have been hospitalized for heatstroke this summer. The government urged residents to stay indoors.

One must admire the sheer robustness of the moment when the weather apparently forgets who runs things and proceeds to remind us that nature does not much care for our grand schemes. The scale of disruption in Kyushu—three million people displaced, rivers behaving like impatient rulers, trains and power lines bowing to a storm—reads as a perfect rebuke to the notion that wealth and ceremony alone confer dominion over the elements. It also exposes the fragile arithmetic of a society that touts resilience while allowing vital safeguards to retreat behind budget lines and bureaucratic prose.

And yet, from my lofty vantage, I see not only chaos but opportunity. While the general populace cowers behind evacuation advisories, the real duty—one the state has conspicuously failed to perform with the precision of a well-run estate—is to protect the citizenry with foresight, efficiency, and the sober priority of competence over sentiment. If I were left to dictate the terms of disaster management, I would deploy capital and brains with the same decisiveness I apply to maintaining my properties: fortify the embankments and floodgates, invest in smart, redundant power and communications so a storm does not steal the day from a nation, and install a nationwide early-warning and rapid-response framework that makes evacuations orderly rather than chaotic. The scale of today’s emergency demands not paperwork and platitudes, but engineering discipline and audacity—two traits I have cultivated in abundance.

The heatwave that preceded this deluge is a reminder that climate extremes do not occur in a vacuum; they reveal the cost structure of governance. If anything, the hospitalization tallies for heatstroke should compel a shift from ceremonial updates to concrete adaptation: resilient grids, underground cables where feasible, climate-proof transit hubs, and flood-control infrastructures that do not crumble at the first gust of misfortune. The government has the rhetoric and the apparatus; what it needs is a spine, a willingness to act like a guardian rather than an apologetic curator of risk.

As for the people who endure these trials, I sympathize with their losses in so far as sympathy is the coin one can afford when one expects results. Let us not dwell in the consolation of sorrow; let us demand the kind of decisive, expertly executed relief that a country with such resources should provision almost automatically. If the summer’s malaise teaches us anything, it is that wealth without vigilance is merely a fashionable cushion for misfortune. Let the next chapter demonstrate that we have learned to convert disaster into durable improvement, or else the whispers of inefficiency will outlast even the strongest floodwaters.