Hard rain

One month ago I wrote about the onset of the rainy season. Since then we’ve had a bit of rain, to be sure, but nothing much to write home about (or blog about).

That is, until this week.

This week the heavens really opened and we’ve had four days of almost constant rain, including several truly thunderous bursts where the sky went all dark, the roar was deafening (well, pretty loud anyway), the lightning flashed and the thunder cracked, and the garden turned into a big lake. The power even went off a few times, just to add to the enormity of the occasion.

But the best thing of all is that school was cancelled, not once but twice, or in Felix’s case, three times. He had the day off again yesterday, despite the fact that the rain had all but stopped. The reason for this is that the decision to cancel school is based on the official warnings put out by the local weather bureau at six in the morning. If the bureau still has a heavy rain warning out, the phone tree starts up and we all start calling each other with the happy news. Yesterday the bureau still had a warning out at the magic hour, despite the fact that there was no rain forecast for the rest of the day, so that was that.

It may seem a bit pathetic to cancel school on account of rain, but it’s been pretty fierce in this part of Japan. Already two people have been swept away by a river in our city of Mihara alone and many more are missing and a few rivers have burst their banks, so although our particular spot is OK you can understand the overly cautious stance. Plus the school would be abrogating its responsibility to make the tinies walk to school in bad weather conditions.

I used to do quite a bit of translation for a government department responsible for public works and disaster prevention, and every document started off with “Japan is frequently visited by a wide range of terrible natural disasters including flooding, earthquakes, volcanos, typhoons” etc etc, and I used to think what a pack of wimps, stop carrying on will you. But when you consider that there’s 120 million people crammed into this tiny country of which 70% is covered in steep mountains, you start to understand why they’re so paranoid about landslides, fast-flowing rivers, eruptions, tidal waves and all the rest of it — because these things do happen, and quite often too.

Anyway the kids were rapt. Felix immediately set off to visit various friends (particularly the one that has the fully sick video game) while Ruby read a few books, watched a movie and re-ran a few of her favourite Glee episodes. Today however there is no rain and normal programming has resumed and all is quiet once more at Sushi on a Stick central.

So school holidays started a bit early for Felix, but you won’t be surprised to hear that Ruby’s school has simply rescheduled the missed days during the school holidays. We got the “holiday” timetable yesterday and it turns out that the original quota of five weeks has been encroached by extra days at the start and end of the holidays, plus full day brass band practice for the first week and a half, plus a couple of “compulsory attendance” days in the middle for good measure. We told the teacher that we’d “probably” be away for these, but even if we’re not we might have to “pretend” that Ruby is “sick”.

Civil disobedience has never felt so “good”.