The unbearable stifling humidity of Tokyo is taking me by surprise. Actually it's taken everyone by surprise. A rednosed besuited wag on Saturday afternoon alleged that it has been the hottest summer for 133 years. Other more trusty news sources have backed that up, partly.
Apparently the autumn is shrinking to nothing. Sub-Saharan heat will dissolve rapidly into Antartic cold. The word 'temperate' keeps bobbing up in my memory like a table-tennis ball in a green pond.
I have walked the deserts of the Holy Land. I have moisted the depths of the Thai rainforests. And nothing has come close. Even the gasping exhaust-fuelled February peak of Buenos Aires is like a temperate day in an English garden in comparison to this.
Japanese men dab at their sweaty faces with small, charmingly-designed towels. I have one, blue and white, bought for me by a certain someone.
Women JOG in the NOONDAY SUN in long tracksuit trousers, long sleeves, visors and GLOVES. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
I'm confused. I feel as if I've entered a parallel universe where I'm a 19-year-old Japanese boy from the provinces just starting out at the International Christian University in Mitaka. Living on the campus might have something to do with it. The thick forest hangs outside my window, the cicadas keep their cement mixers and pneumatic drills in motion, their little hard hats occasionally falling to the soft earth and rotting there in the warm soil. The ICU campus is an isolated world in an obscure suburb of Tokyo, a petri dish of wildlife, wild intellectual stimulation and wild times, baby.
Adolescent students arm themselves into brittle factions. Sporty jocks laugh heartily and scream deafeningly, while jumping up and down repeatedly. Girls caked in make up and wearing charmingly-designed shoes (of varying models), charmingly-designed socks (of varying sizes), hair spraying forth in fountains and marvellous hilly eruptions, group together and totter awkwardly around, giggling nervously. American students wait for their moment to amaze other 'gaijin' (foreigners) around them by nonchalantly babbling away in perfect Japanese...
In short, it's a campus. And one quite different from the awkward labyrinth where I spent my own freshman year back in 1999. Now I'm older, larger, less cynical and more... secure? This feels more like the setting of an American college movie, transposed slightly. In any case I can look upon the herd with distance, and enjoy it. Identity crisis aside.
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