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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 love that dares to squeak its name

Happy Valentine's Day from Tokyo.

My own small attempt to stand against the tsunami of overpriced chocolate, unnecessary wrapping paper and merciless commercialism is below, a piece which also appears in this morning's paper here.

I had always assumed that Japan had the most nauseating Valentine's Day in the world. In researching this story, I learned that in South Korea it is far, far worse. They have taken Valentine's Day and White Day and added half a dozen more spurious Days of their own.

There was interesting sight on Omotesando Avenue this morning, just in front of Gap at the crossing with Meiji Dori, which I cack handedly photographed with my phone.

Apologies for the quality of this image. It shows a young man holding up a sign which reads in Japanese Give me chocolate. On his T-shirt, almost invisible in this picture, ate the English words No Wari.

Valentine's Day in Japan being the day when fanciable young chaps receive choco from their sweet hearts, I take him to be one of the Himote, the anti-Valentine's movement whom I describe below, engaged in a sarcastic act of satrical performance art.

Or perhaps he just had no girlfriend. And no chocolate. I hope he found some. None of the many, many passers-by paid him the least attention. But, true to his T-shirt slogan, it didn't seem to wari him at all.

The Ogre

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi exerting efforts for Confrontation, Utter Devastation, and Imposing All Kinds of Sanctions including Economic Sanctions against Myanmar - If she declares to give them up, the Senior General will personally meet her.

Headline in The New Light of Myanmar, the government-controlled newspaper, 5th October 2007.

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man.

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

W.H Auden, August 1968

Hot News

It's very hot in Japan, in fact it has literally never been hotter. Today in the otherwise obscure municipality of Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture, a temperature of 40.9 degrees centigrade was measured, higher than the Japan Meteorological Agency's previous record of 40.8 C (Yamagata, 1933).

Steeping outside into the sun you feel as if you have been boffed on the head by a large, sweaty, sand-filled sock. It's not just the heat and humidity so much as the thought of the solar radiation beating down around and into you. You can almost feel it cooking your insides, like a plastic container of curry rice in a convenience store microwave.

No wonder, then, that so many people are seeking relief in swimming pools like the one at Tokyo Summerland, pictured above.

Yes, underneath the rubber rings, trunks and congealing Ambre Solaire, that's a swimming pool.

The funniest thing of all is when they switch on the wave machine. Click here to see what happens.

(Clip by CScout Japan, via Plastic Bamboo.)

Man City boss: is he evil?

Until a few weeks ago months ago, when I wrote stories about Thaksin Shinawatra, I identified him with the simple formula "deposed prime minister of Thailand" and filed them to the Foreign Editor. Since then he has risen to become something much more important than a foreign head of government - the owner of a Premiership football team. These days in The Times, he is "Man City boss", first and foremost; my story in today's paper ran in the Sports pages.

Since Thaksin's footie acquisition, there's been a lot written about him in the British papers, a lot more than when he was merely one of the richest and most powerful men in south-east Asia. But no consensus has really emerged on what to make of him. Reduced to its essentials the question seems to be: is this man evil? or, put with a little more sophistication, is he fit for the honour of running one of our venerable Association Football clubs? Is he a classic Asian despot who has fled to our shores after being driven out by his brave people, and who is now sinking his blood-soaked talons into one a prized sporting institution? Or a brilliant businessman and visionary leader who has been shamefully tumbled from power by a clique of unelected generals?

It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. But here is my stab at Thaksin-in-a-nutshell.

Flying Seoul-o

Writing about foreign stereotypes last week, I made sceptical reference to the popular notion of Japan as a land awash in bizarre pornography, where every other salarymen spends his lunch break hunched over rape manga, downloading bukkake videos, and purchasing schoolgirls' underwear from his office vending machine. Japanese smut is certainly distinctive, I acknowledged, but if it really is more widely consumed than in the rest of the world - show us the evidence.

Committed Asia Exile reader Joseh Miller has taken up the challenge by sending me a link to this fascinating page on the website Internet Filter Review. It goes some way towards answering a profound question: who are the world's biggest wankers?

The answers will amaze and appal you.

You have much to learn, Grasshopper

The observation that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of characters meaning "danger" and "opportunity" has always struck me as an especially irritating example of Low-Cal Asian Wisdom. "A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this . . . formulation," as Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, observes. "A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references . . .  It appears, often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for "thinking outside of the box," and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. This catchy expression (Crisis = Danger + Opportunity) has rapidly become nearly as ubiquitous as The Tao of Pooh and Sun Zi's Art of War for the Board / Bed / Bath / Whichever Room."

Hilarious, then, to discover that it is simply not true. The Chinese word for crisis - wēijī - actually means . . . crisis.

Full of beans?

Madame Sosostris, the congested clairvoyant, and this blog's resident supernatural oracle, has got off to a cracking start with her New Year Predictions. Her prophecy for February, of harsh weather and a new humanitarian crisis in North Korea, has come to pass already, as decribed in this grim piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph.

Natto rotted soybeans are in danger of becoming the new daikon (giant radish) of this blog, so I will try not to go on excessively about them. But I would be delinquent if I failed to provide two links.

The first is The Natto Project, a blog written by two friends who hate natto but forced themselves to eat it for breakfast every day. They began last April, and the blog abruptly breaks off without a word of explanation in late May, suggesting that the two may even have died as a result of their experiment.

The second is this thought-provoking rant by a Christian fundamentalist gentleman named Jim Rutz (oh yes!), arguing that soybeans in all their forms make you gay. "There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture," warns Jim, whose latest book is entitled The Meaning of Life. "Most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products." (Thanks to the always interesting What Japan Thinks finding this).

Having the slime of their lives

Below is my piece in this morning's paper about the ongoing natto boom.

For the record, I like natto quite a lot.

Ars Amoris Nipponica

Nowhere else in Tokyo do Japanese and foreigners interact so intensely as in that great cosmopolitan melting pot known as Roppongi. Lotus-eating paradise to some, to others a pathetic pick-up strip, Roppongi is the place where J-Girls and foreign Charisma Men congregate every weekend to find one another. It's an erotic jungle, as hazard-strewn as Borneo, New Guinea or the Upper Amazon. But finally, a Japanese publisher has come up with a Baedeker to guide the first timer through Roppongi's elaborate mating rituals.

It's called Roppongi English and it has been fully scanned in by the excellent Japan Probe blog. No young Japanese lady on the pull can afford not to read it, immediately.