Chan-hom Crossed Japan in the Middle of Obon Week. What Actually Happened to the Trains and Planes.

If a typhoon is going to cross Honshu, the second week of August is the worst possible time for it to do so. This is Obon, the week when a very large share of the Japanese population is on a train or a plane going somewhere else, and the transport system is running at close to capacity with almost no slack to absorb a disruption.

Chan-hom made landfall in southern Ibaraki at around 8 p.m. on Tuesday 11 August, crossed the Kanto plain heading west, and was expected to weaken to a tropical depression by Wednesday afternoon. So the question a lot of people woke up to on Wednesday morning was simple: is the thing I booked still running.

The answer, so far, is mostly yes. That is worth explaining, because it is not the answer people expect after a typhoon makes landfall near Tokyo, and the reasons it turned out this way are the same reasons it might still change.

A Shinkansen platform, where trains are held at stations rather than stranded when wind limits are exceeded

What the operators actually said

Taking Wednesday morning as the reference point, the picture was better than the headlines suggested.

The Tokaido, Tohoku and Hokuriku Shinkansen lines were all scheduled to run normally from the first service of the day, with the caveat that delays and suspensions could still appear later depending on how the rain behaved. JR and the private railways across the Tokyo metropolitan area were also planning normal operation. There were no typhoon-related closures on the expressway network.

Airports were the softer spot. Sendai, Fukushima, Ibaraki, Narita and Haneda were all flagged as places where strong rain, wind and turbulence aloft could produce delays and some cancellations. Note the difference in language: the railways were described as running, the airports as at risk. That distinction is not arbitrary, and it is worth understanding if you are the one holding a ticket.

The day before had been worse. On Tuesday, as the storm approached, the Tohoku Shinkansen ran with delays and some cancellations, while ANA and JAL were reporting no planned cancellations at that point. Airlines were, in other words, holding their schedule as late as they could.

An international departures board during a period of schedule changes

Why the trains held and the planes did not

The instinct is to assume that a storm either shuts transport down or it does not. In practice, rail and aviation fail in completely different ways and on completely different timescales, and Chan-hom is a clean illustration of both.

Railways in Japan run on published wind and rain thresholds. When a sensor on a stretch of line exceeds a set value, that section slows or stops, and it restarts when the reading comes back down and an inspection is done. This is a local, mechanical decision. A storm that passes over a limited stretch of track for a few hours produces a few hours of disruption on that stretch. Because the Shinkansen network is dense and the operators can hold trains at stations rather than strand them, the system usually degrades rather than collapses, and it recovers quickly once the weather clears.

Aviation does not work like that. The constraint is not really the airport, it is the aircraft. A plane that was supposed to be in Sendai this morning is in Fukuoka because yesterday's rotation broke, and the crew that was supposed to fly it is now out of legal duty hours in the wrong city. Cancelling one flight cancels the next four that aircraft was going to operate. This is why airline disruption keeps going after the sky clears, and why the recovery takes a day or two rather than an afternoon.

We wrote about this pattern during Dolphin last week, when Shanghai's airports were still cancelling flights on the Monday after the storm had already weakened to a tropical storm and the wind problem had ended. The same logic applies to Japan this week, at a smaller scale.

So if you are choosing between a Shinkansen ticket and a domestic flight in the two days after a typhoon crosses, the train is the more robust bet, and it is not close.

Platform signage for the Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen lines

The part that is not over

Chan-hom is weakening, and weakening storms are the ones people stop watching. That is usually the mistake.

The Japan Meteorological Agency's rainfall guidance for the twenty-four hours through Wednesday evening was up to 180 millimetres in the Kanto-Koshin region, 150 in Tohoku, 120 in Tokai and 80 in Kinki. Those totals are the storm handing off its moisture as it drags west across the country, and the western numbers were still building on Wednesday while the eastern half was already drying out.

More to the point, moist air continues to feed toward a system like this after the centre has passed. Rain can strengthen again in Kanto, Tohoku, Koshin, Tokai and Kinki on the back side of the track, which is not intuitive if you think of a typhoon as a thing that arrives and then leaves.

And rivers respond on their own schedule. Water that fell on Tuesday night in the hills is still working its way down through the catchments on Wednesday and Thursday, which is why flood warnings often peak on a day that looks clear from a train window. Dolphin did exactly this in Zhejiang and Shanghai two days after landfall.

So the honest summary is: the wind event is over, the water event is not, and the transport recovery is somewhere in between.

Floodwater standing in a town after heavy rain, which arrives well after the wind has gone

What to do if you are travelling this week

A few things that are worth doing rather than worrying about.

Check the operator, not the news. Rail and airline status pages update far faster than any article, including this one. If your Shinkansen line is running, it will say so.

Do not rebook in a panic on the first morning. Airlines issue weather waivers that let you change without a fee, and those waivers usually cover a window of several days. If your flight has not been cancelled, changing it yourself may cost you money that waiting would not have.

If you have a choice, take the train. Not because trains never stop, but because when they stop they stop for hours, and when planes stop they stop for days.

Assume the second half of the week is the recovery, not the disruption. Obon compresses everything, so the seats that open up after cancellations get taken quickly. Being early on the rebooking queue matters more than usual this week.

A station concourse during a busy travel period

Where to check this yourself

For anything you are actually making a decision on, use the official sources rather than this page:

A coastline the day after a tropical cyclone has passed

The short version

A typhoon crossed the most heavily travelled part of Japan during the most heavily travelled week of the year, and the railways mostly held. That is a genuinely impressive outcome and it is worth saying plainly.

But the reason it held is that a fast-moving storm gives a rail network a short, sharp problem it is designed for. Aviation got the version of the problem it is bad at, which is a broken aircraft rotation during a week with no spare seats.

And the rain is still working its way west and downhill. If your plans are on Thursday or Friday rather than Wednesday, the thing to watch is not the storm. It is the rivers.

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