Summer

One of the things I have never really got used to whilst living here in Japan is the concept of 'summer'. Not the seasonal/weather issue but rather the more temporal notion of it - when it begins and when it ends.

I grew with my clock set to June as the beginning of summer and September as its end. This was due to the rhythms of educational life with school, and later college, designating this the time of sunshine and outdoor play. Or, rather this being Ireland, showers and coming home covered in mud.

Here in Japan the school year for primary and secondary schools runs from April to March. As a result the summer holidays here in Hokkaido are only four weeks long (they are six in the rest of the country). They don't commence until the third week of July and are over by the end of the second week in August.

That, put simply, is not right. Not right at all.

Things aren't much better for my university students. Whereas by the beginning of June I was on a plane to either Munich or New York to earn my dollars or deutschmarks, and came home at the start of September full of stories; in Muroran the students finally finish their exams by the middle of August and are expected back by the end of September: a total of seven weeks in all.

That is not right either.

We are into July now and I still have another four weeks of classes to go, followed by a further fortnight of exams. I impatiently await the middle of August but when it arrives I always sense the summer slipping away before it has even properly begun.

Matters are only made more melancholic by what I term the 'Strangers in the night' effect (yes, after the Sinatra song) of the futile overlap between mine and Sanae's holidays. We get a week at most, in August, after which she is back to school and I am back to taking Cian to and from the nursery school every day and, well, they are not holidays any more, are they.

And it says something about the Japanese mindset that this shared week is deemed sufficient. Indeed, anything longer is seen as succumbing to western decadence and after that it's just a short slippery slope to complete amorality, heroin addiction and the collapse of Japanese civilization.

Which is probably true but I still wish I could blog about the first day of the summer holidays beginning tomorrow.

But enough of the melancholy. Here are some photos of my garden.