GOD WILLING AND THE CREEK DON'T RISE

Greetings from a water-logged Japan.  I'm sure there's an ark floating around here somewhere... We are smack in the middle of tsuyu, or the "rainy season," and yesterday marked the 3rd typhoon we've survived in 11 months.  The weather was so dire that afternoon classes were canceled, prompting a loud cheer to go up throughout the school.  I, however, was feeling less cheerful when I arrived home from school dripping wet and had to wring out all my clothes before hanging them to dry.  On the other hand, this puts into perspective the two-piece maroon rain suit that one of my predecessors bequeathed to me.  

The real vexation of the rainy season is that it has limited my mobility, thus giving me less and less fodder for blog posts.  However, stick with me.  Rainy season has to end some time. On the upside, the hydrangeas are rioting in bloom.

STRANGER DANGER

A few months ago my supervisor suggested that I leave school early so I could "go study Japanese culture."  Wink wink.  Needing no further encouragement, I set off for home, and on the way was approached by a man I've never seen before.  "Are you a foreigner?" he asked me.  This was not a rhetorical question; he waited for me to confirm my gaijin status before he took out a bunch of business cards.  This in and of itself is not unusual- I've had teachers, strangers, even students proffer me their cards before. It's actually quite sophisticated.  But this individual took out his business cards, pointed at the kanji and said, "I am doctor."  I studied him closely.  Late thirties, pronounced limp, at home in the middle of the day wearing jeans and a rugby shirt, with a ring of some yellowish substance caked around his mouth that I don't want to think too hard about.  "Yeah, right" was my first thought.  But because I realized that he was not quite right in the head, I smiled and nodded in an attempt to play along.  A mistake, as it turns out.  It got weird after that.  First he attempted to take my pulse by barely pressing his fingers to my wrist- I suppose to demonstrate his doctor skills.  Then he motioned for me to follow him up the street (which was the way I was walking anyway).  I followed, but when he indicated that I should walk into his house, every after school special from my childhood came flooding back to me in brilliant color.  I firmly told him no and backed away, but not before he made another attempt to take my pulse.  Which I guess is better than being found dead in some guy's bathtub (which happened to a British subject a few years back), but it's still creepy.  I haven't seen the man since, but it shook my conception of Japan as a safe haven, free of the dangers that plague other countries.  

A further reminder on this point occurred last week, when the last two people involved in a deadly sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 were apprehended.  The closing of that chapter seemed to relieve a lot of people, even though we go about our daily lives without any real fear of terrorist attacks or violence.  Most of the "crime" that goes on in Japan is pretty benign: having one's bicycle "borrowed," only to have it turn up again; pick pocketing by teenage hoodlums (they could learn a thing or two from Oliver & company- more often than not they are caught in the act); and underwear thieves.  Yes, this is an actual thing.  JET orientation provides a series of warnings against drying your clothes outside (dryers are unheard of here), for fear that ladies' unmentionables will be pilfered by predatory male weirdos.  One thief was apprehended with something like 100 pairs of underwear that he had taken as trophies.  I guess the one consolation in this is that the underwear are all clean?