Spring Breezes

In the most high-tech, over-designed, postmodern, interiorized urban space in the world, people still sneeze. The first warm spring wind easing the neck-tightening chill of winter divides Tokyoites into two camps: allergy-sufferers and the lucky ones.

While anticipating cherry blossoms, tucking away the thick futon, closeting gloves and mufflers, and walking more than all winter, Tokyoites suck in unseen oodles of pollen. There's no escape. The vicious little cells float and flow in the breeze, going anywhere air goes. Tokyo must surely be the only major urban center in the world where a significant portion of the population wears small white surgeon's masks. Eyes peeking out above, the masks filter out the pollen. Supposedly.

This year's pollen delivery arrived too early even for the usually well-timed allergy medicine advertisements to provide advance warning. In one day, half the city was afflicted, their bodies reacting uncontrollably and pathetically.

Around midnight on the first warm Friday, a man bent over the edge of the sidewalk, his girlfriend standing slightly apart, a look of total disdain on her face. It was a typical enough scene, yet the man was not preparing to deliver a "platform pizza," that scourge of late-night sidewalks. He suffered not from too much drink, but from too much mucus.

The eruption from his sinuses was violent, spasmodic and apparently little relief. He sneezed and sneezed. As soon as he stood up, he doubled over again, releasing another blow. His girlfriend stood aside coldly, slapping her needless gloves in her hand like an army officer. OK, maybe he had also indulged a bit, but he was more victim than her compassionless pout wanted to admit. The only thing worse than allergies is receiving no sympathy for allergies.

Granted, allergies are not like real suffering. They are just innocuous enough to be faintly comic. The symptoms are all slight, stupid and embarrassing. Of course, allergy medicine is, like other profitable market niches, seasonally omnipresent in Japan. Everything from Chinese herbs to the latest lab-made molecules are pushed on consumers every spring.

But most of the brightly-colored little boxes yield faint results, and produce equally irritating and infantilizing side-effects -- dizziness, dryness of the mouth, and a peculiar slow-motion dullness. Even with the best that money can buy, you still need tissues, eyedrops, and plenty of gaman. You can't even take a day off work to recover. You'd have to take off six weeks.

On the first fully-pollinated evening, groups gathering by the ticket wickets at the station to say good-night had already entered the portals of the allergy season. The usual back-slapping and bowing were interrupted by sneezing and laughing at sneezing. Tears fell less from farewell than from a big hello to a season of scratchy eyes, dripping noses, and that helpless, underwater feeling.

The train ride was punctuated not by the usual drunken babbling and cellphone mumbling, but by bursts of loud, nasal jack-hammering. One allergy-sufferer sneezed all the way from Shinjuku to Mitaka -- sneeze-pause, sneeze-pause, sneeze-pause. You couldn't see him through the crowd, but you could sure hear him. Even normally staid commuters smiled absently at his ceaseless rhythm. Of course, he'll be sneezing for the next two months.

The Japanese are said to have a traditional love of nature. They respect the smallest of plants, pray to trees and admire the subtlety of colorful flowers. They turn into reverent wanderers in gardens, flock to flower shows, and hop on tour buses to view autumn leaves.

Yet, at least during allergy season, nature puts that love to the test, taunting humans with nose-blowing, eye-watering discomfort. Until the pollen subsides, allergies torment those humans who have decamped from nature to Tokyo's artificial environs with a gently humorous reminder of the disproportion between the power of nature and of humans.

And then, as if nature changes its mind all of a sudden, the pollen magically disappears, and nature rewards allergy-victims and non-sneezers alike with the richness of cherry blossom time, which seems somehow the final result of the same whole process. The cherry blossoms seem to have the power to relieve spring allergies better than anything.

At least, I hope so.

Sniff.

-- Michael Pronko