#32 CHERRY BLOSSOMS

It’s official! The Cherry blossoms are all out and earlier than usual. Well, that’s not entirely true; they are all out all over Japan except for Kanazawa where we live, which they are delayed 2 weeks for the first time in history. Somehow everybody knows that it must have something to do with me arriving here and then causing all the snow. They don’t come right out and say it but when I walk by they grab their children, point in my generally direction and whisper something in their ears. Some of the younger kids start to cry, where the older ones just shake their heads and look away.

Ok, I will grant you that it is rather striking to see all the trees in full bloom, BUT I just found out that these particular species of cherry trees do not in fact produce any actual cherries! What the hell is this all about? I love cherries and have been waiting for 2 months to gorge myself on cherries. I mean there is a freaking cherry tree every 10 feet. Whose bright idea was it to plant all these trees just to see blossoms for at most 10 days a year when they could be eating cheap inexpensive cherries for 9 months out of the year?

When cherries are available at the stores they have to be imported from Argentina and are about 50 cents each!

Enough about cherries or the lack of…

Last night on the news, the big story of the day was a Department of Transportation report. It seems that last year 537 people had been “caught” in the train doors when they were closing. They weren’t hurt or injured of course as the doors open automatically if someone or something is stuck in them, just like elevator doors. However this was totally unacceptable for some reason that I or they for that matter can explain. It goes something like this. They spent 150,000,000 yen last year studying the matter and had concluded in a 2,019 page report that the reason was that when the trains were about to depart the conductor would sound the alarm bell for 10 seconds and people would rush to the doors and get caught, all 537 of them. Considering that well over 363 billion people use the trains in Japan each day this doesn’t seem to big a problem to me, but to the Japanese this was totally inexcusable.

First let me say that I’m not making this up; The Department of Transportation report concluded that the best way to correct this national disgrace was to shorten the alarm bell to 9 seconds! And since they have implemented the 9 second alarm bell there has only been 308 people caught in the doors this year! Now you know me, I’d hate to be the one to rain or snow or their parade, but if you do the math, last year the average was 45 a month and if you extrapolate for this whole year, it works out to 77 a month.

I know somehow this is going to come back to me, as I had to take the train to get here and actually had the doors close on me…

Later

Lenny

lennyoberg@hotmail.com

April 11, 2007