Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

In my car headlights A frog hops across the road, Making me swerve

Scratching on the tatami A centipede marches nowhere, Woken by the rain.

Violent winds Rattle the windows I turn the TV up.

Outside at night Liquid falls on old oil drums I am still awake

As the more observant of you will have noticed, when I write haiku’s my ability to sound like an ostentatious prick is matched only by my inability to compose them in syllabically correct manner. Anyway, the theme of those haiku’s may have given you a clue as to the diary topic today - its rainy season here in Japan. Coupled with the atrocious change in weather that tsuyu (rainy season - oddly, the kanji for tsuyu literally means ‘plum rain’) brings, we also have the added enjoyment of being pummelled by Typhoon No.6 at the moment. Tsuyu officially started a while back but has only recently been rearing its ugly wet head and showing new JETs what an arse it can be, by way of rain, wind, and forcing people like me to actually personify it in the style I just did, which itself is a complete tragedy in literary terms.

It has been raining now almost non-stop since Monday. Rice fields and rivers are swelling, the atmosphere has become oppressively humid and frogs are absolutely fricking EVERYWHERE. You can count the squashed frogs on the road as you drive, every 100 metres yielding approximately 5 or 6 flattened or party mangled amphibians. Frogs are incredibly stupid. Mother nature sought fit to give frogs the innate ability to stop dead in their tracks should they be ever shined upon by a bright light, which is probably the most idiotic defense mechanism in the entire animal kingdom. Cars at night are now akin to frog ploughs. If I just drove normally, I would wipe-out about 20 frogs just by going to the convenience store. Hence, now I have to swerve wildly from one side of the road to the other, avoiding frogs who have seen my headlights and halted in a cacked-pants fashion hoping that whatever it is that is about to kill them somehow fails, leaving me not actually watching where I am going, but concentrating on road debris, trying to decipher frogs from pebbles or leaves SMASH everyone is dead.

In other news, Dad, sorry I forgot Fathers Day. I’m crap like that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2003 at 10:54 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.