Off the scale campness

How did Japan get to be so camp? The boys have all become girls and so now the girls have to inhabit a place beyond that, into outright squeaky girliness. Harmless, I know, and rather fun too, but honestly?

Yes, yes, I know Japan's got 4 seasons...

Early April in Japan is a time of renewal, of their famous cherry blossom, but that also means it's a time of rains; it happens every year - it's almost as if nature is saying: ooh, look at all this lovely blossom, and then sending torrential downpours to sweep it all into the gutters.

I do get mildly irritated, though, when Japanese people say to me that Japan has 4 seasons - I feel like replying; and so do we, and I also have two buttocks but what of it? I suppose that this may be because so much of SE Asia has only two (hot + hot and wet) so it always comes as a surprise to them when I say, actually, you've got 5, and pretty much all of them are bloody awful. To be honest, I leave out the last part, but here are Tokyo's seasons in all their glory:

Winter; often bitterly cold with prolonged rains that last days without end, sporadic crisp sunny days
Spring; miserable, wet, cold then a brief mild sunny period
Rainy season; humid, fetid, wet, damp and miserable, insufferable rains that go on for what feels like forever
Summer; hot and stifling, rotten, wretched and sweaty
Autumn; typhoons, strong winds and rain, punctuated by some nice crisp autumn days

Let this be a lesson to me.

You lucky basta...

On the Tokyo train going to work a few days back, I saw a cool young guy pull out what I thought was an Apple iPad - it was a medium sized, thin looking device that he was clearly objectifying. Although it's been on sale in the US for a few weeks it isn't available here yet, though there are people who have managed to get their hands on them, through friends, desperate online auctions etc. so of course the first thing you'd do would be to take it on the train and use it as mock-nonchalantly as possible, right? If you were that kind of person. Lucky bastard, I thought, moving in closer for a peek - which is when I realised it was actually a mirror that he was using to preen himself in front of before putting it back in his bag.