"Officers from both emergency services already do pull together, working alongside week in, week out, as has been evidenced most recently by the appalling floods," he said.
Thailand's appalling floods in 2011, which closed car plants and many other Japanese manufacturers, have not fundamentally changed business plans; after all, insurance payouts minimised companies' losses.In Indonesia, another country with long-standing economic links to Japan, Japanese companies recently won a $370m contract to start building a new underground transit system in Jakarta.
The conditions were appalling: bathrooms flooded and rat-infested; bedrooms overcrowded.
I'd pick up the newspaper on the train and skim through it and there'd be another flood, an appalling virus, something awful, which is of course happening all the time.
Perhaps the appalling weather and widespread flooding had something to do with it.
"So far, more than 608,000 readers have signed our petition urging the government to sort out the appalling mess over asylum, which sees a flood of economic refugees jeopardising the rights of those who are fleeing persecution in their homelands".
In that job, he asked people what they wanted, got to grips with the capital's appalling traffic and lessened the impact of the annual monsoon floods.
Hurricanes, tidal waves, floods, earthquakes and terrorism this year have all brought with them not only appalling scenes of devastation, death and suffering, but also outrage at the lack of preparations to avoid or cope with these disasters.
Her warmth and gregarious humanity flood the margins of this volume, placing the horrors she witnessed in an even more appalling light.
Yet if it features in the international media it tends to be either as the scene of an appalling natural disaster flood or cyclone or as the crucible for one of the great experiments in microcredit.Its politics tend to be ignored.
