Particle Plague: Hay Fever in Japan
[It's the beginning of one of the two most beautiful times of the year in Japan. But out on the Musashi Plain, the cedar trees are vomiting forth clouds of pollen. Times readers will have seen my important story last week about how, as well 32 million humans, Japan's Snow Monkeys are being tormented by the pollen allergy. Here is a piece I wrote for the Independent a few years ago about life with kafunsho.]
It begins as it does every year in this season: on the first of the sunny days of March, I am woken from sleep when, with a brief tickle of warning, my nose explodes. Between bed and bathroom, I sneeze another half a dozen times; by the time I've got my hands on a piece of tissue paper, my nose is drooling and my eyes feel as if they are being gently buffed with sandpaper. I have had only one other experience like it - six years ago, when I caught a dose of the notoriously powerful tear gas used by the South Korean riot police. This is peaceful Tokyo, but for these few weeks - between the first of the spring sunshine and the passing of the cherry blossom - it is takes on the look of a place under chemical and biological attack.
Outside, people wear white surgical masks over their mouths and noses; even those with perfect eyesight have wide protective spectacles. Salarymen weep into their newspapers; office ladies fumble with nose sprays and eyedrops. For this is the season of hay fever, and across Tokyo millions of people are suffering like me.
The English term hay fever hardly does justice to what Japanese call kafunsho - literally 'pollen symptoms', but better thought of as Particle Plague. Cast from your mind images of delicate sniffling on freshly mown lawns - Japanese hay fever is industrial in its scale and ferocity. Scientific studies estimate that 20 million people are affected by it; a couple of years ago, it was reckoned to be costing the country an annual US dollars 2 billion in lost productivity and medical fees. Japan's parliament even has a parliamentary group dedicated to the problem, known as the Hakushon Giin Renmei (which translates literally as the Atishoo! MPs' League). But in the face of kafunsho even the most mighty politicians are powerless.
Everyone knows the cause of the problem: the beautiful and magnificent tree called the cryptomeria or Japanese cedar. The reddish brown cryptomerias, with their rugged hundred foot trunks, have a noble and venerable place in Japanese culture. Eerie silent forests of the trees line the approaches to the oldest Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. But they are also a valuable timber tree, quick growing and versatile - and here lies the root of the problem.
In the boom years of Japan's post-war growth, millions of cryptomeria were harvested and replanted for use in construction. Then rising wages and the slowing economy made it cheaper to import foreign timber. The unharvested cryptomerias flourished and grew - of the 31,000 hectares of forest in the Tokyo metropolitan area, 22,000 hectares are cedars. And every year, at about this time, pollen billows invisibly from their stamens and is borne across the city on the spring breezes.
For some reason, probably because of traffic pollution and the absence of absorbent earth and open ground, people in cities suffer far more than those in the country side. High summer temperatures, too, are said to have increased the pollen yield. The prescription drugs available are unreliable, working for some people and not for others, but every pollen victim seems to have his or her own favourite brand of snake oil.
One man spends 450 pounds a season on traditional remedies from a Chinese apothecary. A young woman swears by Japanese basil juice. Some people rely on decontamination, wearing hats outside and taking a shower and changing as soon as they become in, to prevent the clinging pollen getting into the house on hair and clothes.
The department stores have all set up aisles of ingenious "Anti-Pollen Goods". There are eye washing baths and nose-clearing sprays. There are a dozen different kinds of face mask, one with a "unique pleated design", another featuring a "micro-air screen filter". On the principle of the hair of the dog, there is cedar tea and cryptomeria pollen sweets, "containing real cryptomeria pollen".
As for comprehensive solutions, there is none in sight. The city of Tokyo has a plan to also inject cedars with an experimental serum to reduce their fecundity. It will begin cutting down the mature cedars, which produce the most pollen, but this will take up to half a century. This is the saddest irony that, in a city with little enough greenery and vegetation, the few trees that remain are driving everybody crazy.
The Independent
26th May 2002
