Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

The rainy season is slowly rearing its cloud of grey and air of mug upon us.

For no real reason I went on a long road trip a couple of weekends ago, just because I had sweet naff all to do and didn’t fancy pandering to my Junior High School students’ usual impromptu weekend visits to my house where they eat all my food and borrow my video games. Incidentally, Takanari-kun, if by some miracle of biblical proportions you are both reading AND understanding this, give me back Mario Kart by next week you little bastard.

Weather seems to change quickly in Japan around this time. One minute it can be quite balmy, then a few moments later a colossal gust of wind will smash through the school blowing all my students out the windows, apart from the fat ones who just sort of roll onto the floor and flail about like dying turtles. Oh yeah, in Japanese schools its some sort of policy to keep windows open (air circulation) at all times to prevent the kids catching cold, even when it is the dead of winter outside, which nobody seems to notice the obvious and stupid irony in, except me. Today for example was an extremely windy day and the windows in the classrooms were wide open. I was literally plucking bits of kids’ test papers as they flew through the air, in a kind of Mr Miyagi fly / chopstick stylee, except with the distinct absence of that whiny doe-eyed bully target Daniel. As an aside, I always wondered how far the real Mr Miyagi would ever take the kohai / sempai dynamic, if he ever started to hate the living shit out of Daniel, for example “You no ask question! Must cut off own leg for good karate! Take saw! Now saw! Innnnn, ouuuuut, iiiiiiin, ouuuut. You my bitch! No rook at me, rook reg!”

Anyway, my road trip took me down to a city (in name only) called Ookuchi, which literally means “big mouth”. I would like to see more Japanese town names like this, perhaps something along the lines of “huge penis” or “zeppelin-like arse”. After getting to Ookuchi and realising I was going way too far south, I headed west towards the coast, to an area called Ashikita. This area has many beaches and is also home to the town Minamata, which gained international notoriety in recent history when its citizens were plagued by bouts of mercury poisoning from the seawater. Driving very fast through that town I arrived at a beach-ish area a few towns along. Then the weather changed. It was quite comedic in a tragic way, pulling up to the beach carpark and suddenly feeling the air chill and see the skies blacken, then opening my door and getting swept away by a monsoon.

The disappointment was huge, since I had brought suntan lotion and other sun / fun related paraphernalia. Its like those dreams you have where you skip happily towards the beach but then you get to the shore and its not a beach, its actually a vast expanse of vomit, bugs and used prophylactics. Like Bognor Regis. Or most of Essex.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2003 at 10:42 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.