March 6–10蟄虫啓戸 Sugomori mushito o hiraku - Hibernating insects surface
March 11–15桃始笑 Momo hajimete saku - First peach blossoms
March 16–20菜虫化蝶 Namushi chō to naru - Caterpillars become butterflies
March 6th...the first Sunday of the month. If you've just joined us, we're into sub-season three, microseason number seven of our '72 Japanese Microseasons' thematic framework thing. Today marks the beginning of Sugomori mushito o hiraku - Hibernating insects surface. That means we should be expecting something of a ' mass insect awakening' over the course of the next five days or so.
As for me? I'm due to teach my first class in over six weeks at Mr. Insecthead's COVID Volcano kindergarten on Tuesday.
Perhaps he'll surface?
This morning started off promising enough - mild and sunny; but just after lunch, a raft of asphalt-grey clouds started moving in from the north west, buoyed by a bitterly cold Siberian wind. Mina said there'd been some sleet flying around on her way back from the ¥100 store with okasan. Factoring in wind chill, the current 6C is feeling more like around 2.
I'm thinking that any insects that had planned on arising from their ancient slumbers today will likely decide to hit their snooze buttons until at least Wednesday.
Microseason business aside, this juncture of late winter/early spring is what the J-natives refer to as 三寒四温 (sankan shion), which literally means, ‘three days cold, four days warm’. Considering the relatively mild and palatable weather from Wednesday to this morning, we're apparently due for a sustained three day winter bitch slap.
As for me, it's been a bit of a rough ride since the last installment, when we were on the cusp of Kasumi hajimete tanabiku - 'Mist starts to linger' (February 24–28). While I can't speak to the presence of any notable lingering mists, it was cold enough to keep me indoors, out of the serotonin emitting sunshine, and on Mina's spin bike for the week.
Come the afternoon of Thursday, February 24th, my government booster vaccine voucher finally arrived in the post. This was a massive relief. It was overdue, and I'd been in a bit of a panic due to the aforementioned scheduled resumption of my duties as 'Clown Custodian of the English Language' over at Mr. Insecthead's COVID Volcano on Tuesday, March 8th.
I haven't darkened their doorstep since the third week of January - having had all of my classes cancelled on account of Nagoya City's plague guidelines mandating that schools with cases of staff or student infection shutter for at least ten days. Moreover, they requested that all city pre-schools temporarily scale back their operations to 'reduce the risk' of this omicron business spreading even faster. Parents were asked to refrain from bringing their kids unless absolutely necessary (i.e., there are no other care options available, and both parents must work), and ancillary staff were laid off until the city's '(quasi) State of Emergency' could be be lifted.
'quasi'?
I suppose this refers to the government's 'request' that dining establishments and bars refrain from serving alcohol after 8pm - or risk not being eligible for a meagre handout meant to help 'offset' their considerable lost income. As far as restrictions are concerned, this seems to be about as far as the powers that be are willing to go. The stark reality on the ground is that a lot of shops just don't give a shit, and simply continue to serve booze late into the evening anyways.
The current COVID numbers seem to reflect this.
According to Mr. Insecthead's limited email correspondence, the school has also been hit hard by a succession of cluster infections since I'd been furloughed. Somehow they'd managed to dodge the bullet last summer/autumn...but not this time. Apparently omicron has a thing for little kids.
This comes as little surprise. While it's been tough losing that income, I can only be glad that I haven't been there to share in all of the most recent pandemic drama. I have no desire to roll the dice on a COVID infection with my underlying health conditions.
In the interim, while infection rates appear to have peaked out nation-wide, the numbers in Aichi Prefecture, and Deadbeat City have remained relatively constant, hovering between three and five thousand, and twelve hundred to two thousand per day, respectively. While there's always a bit of daily/weekly variation (Sunday and Monday numbers are usually a bit lower), in the big picture it's pretty static. While the numbers have dipped a little, they aren't really dropping like they did the last time around.
As of late last week, they actually seemed to be on a bit of a rebound - as compared to the last week of February.
That was around the time Losersville's ne'er do well city council suddenly decided, 'Damn the torpedoes, we're going to reverse course, and mandate that, 'quasi-State of Emergency' aside, from March 7th, ALL kindergartens and nursery schools will be 'requested' to remain completely open every day, regardless of cluster infections among students or staff members'.
One can only guess at the logic at play here. Perhaps they caved to the complaints and demands of working parents who had nowhere to dump their kids, and were unable to take time off? Maybe they simply didn't want to continue offsetting the mounting costs of keeping the facilities shuttered. According to what I've read, it's almost certainly more the latter than the former.
I know that Mr.Insecthead had continued to run the school as something of a last-resort daycare centre - though regular classes had been suspended. Whether this continued to be the case as successive clusters were identified among staff and students, I'm not sure. The responsible thing to do would be to temporarily shutter the operation, of course.
It seems that the government's dubious thinking here is that they now apparently believe they'll be able control these rampant cluster situations by simply employing more diligent 'contact tracing'. Easy peasy.
Sadly, this sort of thing is fairly emblematic of the type of out of touch stupidity that the old men in grey routinely come out with over here. Two years and six waves into the pandemic, and it's still pretty much 'pin the tail on the donkey' over at city hall.
It's fairly obvious that none of the retirement age men that call the shots over here have ever actually spent any time at a local kindergarten or nursery school. I teach three groups of kids, aged three, four and five respectively. There are fifty children, and two or three Japanese 'teachers' in each group. Everyone is crammed into a classroom that's about the size of a normal studio apartment. Throw one or two infected people into that mix, and who wouldn't be reasonably considered a 'close contact'?
It beggars belief.
Then there's the current 'third jab' booster vaccination debacle. The rollout is three months behind 'schedule', and completely disorganized. In other countries, vaccines are made easily accessible, and venues are everywhere. Here, we are made to wait for 'official vouchers' from the government. These are distributed by post, and released in lots based on geographic locale (people in big cities get them first), and age availability. The process is painfully slow. Everyone has to wait their turn, and finally being able to get a booster is made to seem as if it's like some magical windfall or privilege.
Like getting one of Willy Wonka's fucking 'Golden Tickets'.
Last time around, Mr. Insecthead got everyone at the school enrolled in a 'workplace vaccination' program, which was aimed at getting people in high risk jobs jabbed a bit quicker than if they were stuck waiting for a voucher in the post.
For whatever reason, there is no similar scheme afoot this time around - despite the sustained rates of infection, and subsequent hospitalization and mortality rates being far higher than at the peak of the fifth wave last August. I suppose it was simply too costly and troublesome for the city to organize.
It seemed inconceivable that they'd actually be able to do a worse job than they did last summer...but here we are. I guess with the Olympics going on, and 'the world watching', there was some sense that they had to make a show of getting their shit together. Now, it's simply back to arrogant fumbling and bumbling. Business as usual.
Aside from myself (55), Mr. Insecthead (61) and Insect Wife (fifty something?), the staff over there are mostly girls between the ages of 22 and 30. It's pretty safe to assume that the majority of them have yet to receive any government vouchers. With the amount of spread happening among younger kids now, I can't think of a more hazard fraught work environment - other than maybe a packed beer hall at the height of Oktoberfest. How stressful. With no access to booster jabs to at least offset their personal risk, they might as well be going in to work with giant targets painted on their backs.
Mina drove me over to the International Conference Centre over on the west bank of the Horikawa canal for my 'appointment' on the evening of Saturday, Feb. 26th. There weren't many people there at all, and I was struck at how quickly it was over and done with.
After the fact, I was less than thrilled to learn that I'd received an expired vaccine dose.
A couple of weeks ago there'd been some kerfuffle in the press about people noticing that the expiry dates on their Pfizer vaccines had been scratched out and written back on in PENCIL (!?!).
The story here is that (according to the latest available data) apparently Pfizer and Moderna have independently determined that - provided their vaccines have been properly maintained at the correct temperatures - they should continue to be safe and viable for three months past their printed expiry dates.
Thus, they're now supposedly good for nine months, as opposed to six.
Unsurprisingly, the Japanese government never bothered to properly announce or explain the situation.
There was no information regarding the use of expired vaccines at the venue. When Mina asked a few of her doctor/nurse colleagues at the hospital, no one knew anything about it...nor did my Saturday morning doctor student. As such, it would also be reasonable to assume that the majority of people queueing up at the venue had no idea, either.
Before we selected the venue for my booster jab, Mina checked out several local alternatives - her workplace being among them. Upon enquiry, it was confirmed that they were all using expired doses. Whether these were limited in number, or being used alternately with 'good doses' was unclear. No one would (or could) say.
We ended up choosing the International Conference Center, because it was close, and they had space for us to make a reservation on Saturday evening. She warned me that it was likely that I'd be getting an expired jab, and not to be too shocked or angry if that ended up being the case. I went in 'fingers crossed', hoping that I'd be lucky.
Sure enough, after I got jabbed she ran a cross check of my vaccine's lot number, and it came up as 'expired' - as of mid-January this year.
I couldn't help being sort of pissed off. I felt that I had been put in a position where the choices I had were to either hold off on getting the booster (and roll the dice on jumping back into Mr. Insecthead's kindergarten COVID volcano with waning antibodies) or just get the jab on offer, and hope that even with slightly lowered efficacy, it'd give me enough of a boost to at least dodge any chance of serious infection this spring.
The thing that got Mina's goat was the fact that the venue hadn't bothered to provide any information regarding the use of expired vaccines, or any re-assurances that they were safe and viable. While some prefectures are apparently informing people at the venues, it seems that Aichi has elected not to. I wonder how many of the people there for booster jabs would have chosen to wait had they known they'd be getting an expired dose? It seems deceptive and creepy that they would deliberately neglect to mention it.
When we got back, Mina wrote a rather pointed email to the prefectural government. Of course, they haven't responded.
Fortunately we didn't have to deal with minding okasan that weekend. We spent Sunday on the couch. I had a fever and felt like garbage. We watched Wonder Woman 84 on Netflix. It was long winded and really awful. Monday wasn't much better; but by mid-afternoon, my temperature had finally receded to around 37C.
This post booster malaise carried on through Tuesday, so I decided to ditch on going for my run until Wednesday (March 2nd)...one day into microseason number six - Sōmoku mebae izuru - Grass sprouts, trees bud.
Expectations were high. I hadn't been out and up the canal for over a week, and Wednesday morning was unusually sunny and mild. While there was a light wind, it wasn't the 'hail of a thousand frozen knives' that had kept me in and on the spin bike the week before. This was 'sankan shion' weather. The seasonal pivot between the end of winter and beginning of spring in these parts.
Everything was great until about five minutes into my run, when I suddenly started to feel a bowel movement coming on.
I was miffed. I must have gone at least three times already that morning.
This doesn't happen to me too often, actually. Maybe once a year? Sometimes I can just run through it and suppress the urge. I had the choice of turning around and heading back, or pressing on to the park around the old Dampusan burial mound on the east side of the Horikawa - pretty close to my run's halfway point. I decided to hold it and press on, and by the time I hit the public restroom between the baseball practice field and the western edge of the mound, it was showtime.
Despite the fact that the Japanese are generally (if nothing else) pretty tidy folk - someone had somehow totally missed the target and shit on the floor beside the Japanese style toilet. Fortunately, the 'western toilet' was the least horrible of the two - though there were the remains of something ugly around the insides of the basin. As luck would have it, the paper dispenser in that stall was empty, and all I had in my pouch was a tiny packet of advertising tissue that Mina had plucked out of our mailbox. That simply wasn't going to do the job that needed to be done this morning. I wasted no time in balling up a huge wad of shit tickets from the fecal explosion toilet stall, covered the seat of the 'western toilet' (NOT sitting on THAT), and did my unfortunate business, with no fanfare, and not a sheet of single ply to spare.
How does someone manage to completely miss the toilet?
That grim task done and sorted, I was back on course - south to the far bridge near the old Edo ferry terminal at Miya, then across and back through the site of the old Nagoya fish market (where I was accosted by that predatory homosexual last June). Near the foot of the second bridge heading north, I spotted the year's first tiny clutch of radiant early sakura on a tiny gnarled bough just over the canal railing. Of all the budding and flowering trees on my run, year after year this particular one is always the winner. It buds two or three weeks earlier than almost all of the others, and fully flowers for around ten days...usually during the second week of March. It's a bit of a runty underdog tree, growing in the narrow space between the path railing and the cement drop wall to the Horikawa; but its flowers are a lush pink, and beautiful.
Seeing that tiny clutch of early blossoms was a real spirit lifter. I was finally starting to feel somewhat human again after three days of post expired vaccine cruddiness.
Sadly, this was to be short lived.
Good morning, Mr Scaramanga
Mina took Thursday off, and we were out and on the road shortly before 8 am to ensure that we made it to the dermatology clinic in Tokai-shi before check-in at 8:45. We'd gone in to see Dr. Inasaka just after the New Year's Shogatsu holiday wrapped in early January so I could have a concerning looking mole checked out, and see about getting an odd pencil-eraser sized nub (!) removed from the middle of my chest. The pink, rubbery nub's size and character made it seem like I had developed a third nipple (minus the areola). It looked freakish. I felt like Francisco Scaramanga - that old Bond villain played by the late Christopher Lee in The Man With The Golden Gun. Scaramanga had a third nipple - or 'superfluous papilla'. It was the assassin's sole identifying feature - outside of his signature 'golden gun', that is. When I saw the movie as a kid, the freakishness of that third nipple thing always stuck with me.
Forty-five years on, I'd be less than impressed to be hosting one myself.
The mole was nothing new - Inasaka had done a stamp biopsy on it a few years ago, and determined that it wasn't cancerous; but in the interim, it had seemed to swell a little, and darken slightly. In short, it was making me feel a bit uneasy.
The trigger for finally going in and getting it checked out again had been a news item I'd seen in December. A spectator behind the glass at a Vancouver Canucks hockey game had noticed a suspicious looking mole on the back of the team's assistant equipment manager's neck, snapped a picture of it with her smart phone, then got his attention - showing him a text message with the words 'cancer', 'mole' and 'doctor' highlighted in large red text. Long story short - he heeded the spectator's warning and went to see his dermatologist. The hockey fan/ part-time nurse's assistant 's amateur assessment had been bang-on. The mole was diagnosed as a type-2 malignant melanoma, and quickly removed. Left unnoticed and untreated, it might well have killed him.
Dr. Inasaka's been my go-to dermatologist since 2016. He had dispatched 'Carl the Lump' four years ago, when he was working at the same hospital as Mina. 'Carl' was a benign lipoma that had gradually made itself at home on back of the left side of my neck. While the doctor had determined that 'Carl' wasn't life-threatening, the lump had become noticeable, and was making me feel self conscious. After mulling it over for a year or so, Mayumi made some offhand comment to Mina about it, and I finally decided that 'Carl' had to go.
I was pretty freaked out about the whole procedure, as I'd never had any real surgery before, and it would be my first time 'under the knife', as it were. Inasaka put me at ease immediately, and after forty five minutes (with minimum discomfort) 'Carl the Lump' was history. Nothing more than a fleshy steamed gyoza looking thing bobbing up and down in a little jar of formaldehyde.
I had been pretty impressed with Inasaka's skill and affability. When he left the hospital to open his own clinic shortly after my procedure, I decided that I would be taking any relative business to him in the future.
Fortunately, the mole was no problem. A few sustained blasts of super cold liquid nitrogen, and it scabbed and fell off after almost three weeks, leaving behind nothing more than a tiny, shadowy little mark.
The 'nub' would require a bit more doing, so we booked an appointment for March 3rd...hoping that the COVID situation would have peaked and be on a bit more of a pronounced downward trajectory than what it currently is.
At least the clinic is closed to drop in's on Thursdays...meaning that only patients booked in for minor surgeries are seen.
When we were there in January, it was nerve wracking, with patients wall-to-wall in the small waiting area before 10 am.
At that point, the numbers were nowhere near where they are now, either.
The whole procedure took no more than twenty minutes. The local anesthetic worked well enough, though didn't totally cancel out the sensation of my skin being pulled, which has to be one of the worst sensations ever. Incision closed, stitched and bandaged, Inasaka asked if I'd like to have a last look at the culprit pseudo-nipple nub thing, as it bobbed around in it's own little formaldehyde container. A pink, rubbery looking nub....the size and shape of a pencil eraser, a bit tapered and red on the end, where it had to be dug and rooted out.
Goodbye, Mr. Scaramanga.
As the surgical anesthetic and pain killers started to wear off a few hours later, it seemed to smart a fair bit more than it had after 'Carl' had been removed. I pretty quickly dismissed any previous ideas I'd had about getting a run up the canal in on Friday morning.
It was our turn to take the old lady for Saturday and Sunday. She was up to her usual hijinks, running Mina and Mayumi around from early Saturday morning, buying her stamps and carbon paper so that she could set up shop at our kitchen table and make seasonal postcards for her friends. She does a lovely job, and we've assembled a scrap book of cards that she's put together over the years. She has talent. Best of all, when she gets into doing her crafts, she's way less annoying....much like a kid. Ensconced in her art projects, she's focussed, likable and funny.
The trouble starts when she's bored and at loose ends. Then she gets demanding, selfish and rude.
So, after Mina and Mayumi had bent over backwards running around, fulfilling all of her requests, after lunch on Sunday she let out a cackle and announced, "I'm 'boke' (pronounced bo-kay - meaning 'mentally retarded')" to Mina. After all the fussing and running around, apparently she'd 'forgotten' her stack of blank post cards in her room at Mayumi's.
There'd be no crafting that afternoon. Just couching in front of the TV, and
waiting to be waited on.
At that point, Mina and I just looked at each other and shook our heads. Who's going to snap first? At least I can extricate myself from the front side of the apartment when things start to unravel. Retreat to the classroom and fiddle around on the computer, or go lay down in our bedroom.
Poor Mina has no escape.
As for okasan's bi-weekly 'virtual report card', this weekend she comes in with her second solid 'D' in a row. I wasn't feeling great after the surgery, and thought I was going to snap on Sunday afternoon, after her cackling at Mina about forgetting the postcards stunt. I honestly don't know how Mayumi can handle it. At least the old lady has her own room over there. There's a buffer. When she comes here, she takes over our entire living space.
Finally, it's her complete insensitivity to the needs or existence of other people that sucks all the air out of the room.
Through it all she just sits resplendent on the couch like Queen Victoria, talks to herself, and cackles at mindless television programs.
It's harsh.
Surely though, we can only feel blessed not to be forced to flee from our place, old lady in tow, to a dirty corner of the subway station across the railway bridge for fear of being bombed out and/or murdered in our homes by an invading army.
The scenes unfolding daily on the TV news programs are indeed horrifying and surreal.
There we have it. All the bits that matter, and a lot that just don't. A wrap until sub season four, Shunbun - Spring equinox. That'll be in two weeks (or thereabouts).
As always, you'd do well to remember that, "No matter where you go, there you are".
There, and nowhere else.
Comments