Exhibition 'Caribbean ties: Connected people, then and now'. The exhibition (free entry) is open on weekdays until 20 May and can be visited at Oude UB, Rapenburg 70, Leiden.

The Japanese are famous for their love of nature. So why are their coastlines and rivers full of concrete against typhoons? In a century of newspaper discussion about them that I have reconstructed, typhoons appear as a “spectral” presence of violent natural forces.