The cherry blossoms are here in Shin-Urayasu! Beautiful, white clouds of them are visible from my back porch. They embrace the sight and modulate the ugly box building modernism of this town into a higher pitch of appreciation. My son picks out “sakura” on the koto while my daughter sings. Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) parties are featured on the evening news with the ubiquitous blue plastic tarps spread on the ground acting as impromptu stages for the antics of costume “players,” gigling office ladies and drunk salary men, while above the gamut of emotions playing themselves out to boredom, hangovers and exhaustion, those ethereal flowers here and gone before you know it.

Not so quick to vanish, however, is hay fever: the legacy of the fire-bombings and deprivations of W.W.II as every Japanese will say. When Japan was rebuilt, forests that vanished to provide heat and wood for the population and which also vanished beneath the fire-bombings of the allied forces, were replaced with cedar trees that now exude near-lethal fogs of pollen. I’ve seen people literally liquify into weeping, coughing, scratching, nose-blowing stumbling and half-blind sufferers when the wind changes and brings a pollen-freighted breeze in contact with sensitive eyes and membranes. Virulent hay fever has been hanging with us for the past month like an evil star in the sky.

Time for another pill before I go out this morning to appreciate the cherry blossoms one last time before they’re gone.