Anyone who has talked to me lately will not be in any doubt that summer is here. The sun rises about 4.30 a.m. The cicadas are unbearably noisy from shortly after that until mid-morning, when they thankfully finally stop their “singing” routine and, like the rest of us, try to just sit out the 36 degree or so days and high humidity. The nights are almost as hot and clammy, and in fact we had a few weeks where the temperature rarely dipped below 30 even overnight.

Summer has brought lots of fun activities to though not least a seemingly non-stop run of summer festivals. These vary in scale and pedigree, but they all have a lot in common – people out to have a good time and summer festival foods like kakigori (shaved ice with sweet colourful syrup toppings), yakisoba (fried noodles), hot dogs, fairy floss, popcorn, and other nutritionally dubious treats. Many people, especially women and children, dress up in traditional outfits, which for me is one of the more enjoyable aspects of these events and gives them a real sense of place.

On the way home from the gym recently, I noticed a small festival being set up in a park near home, that we hadn’t heard about. We decide to check it out and ended up staying quite a while and having fun with the various kids games (catching water-bomb balloons with a tiny hook; lucky dips; etc) and navigating the decidedly dicey culinary waters.

Early summer is the rainy season in Japan and this year it came about 20 days early, arriving in the second half of May. The average arrival date in Kanto (Tokyo, Odawara and surrounds) is June 8 (very specific I know, but weather and seasonal date prediction seems to be a bit of a fine art in Japan). Global warming and crazy climate change? Who knows… But the warm days we had in early May got a bit cool again and we had more or less non-stop rain for a bit over a week. Today is very warm – heading for high 20s I think, and already 26 in my office.

The rainy season is known as tsuyu in Japanese – literally meaning plum rain, as it coincides with the ripening of plums. We don’t have any plum trees to show off, but we do have plenty of hydrangeas (ajisai in Japanese) that have taken their cue from the weather and transformed from rather ugly and angular bare sticks into fine displays of fresh green leaves and bluey-purple flowers.

Keira is mildly disappointed we don’t have pink hydrangeas and I have mildly thought about messing with the soil pH to tweak the colour, but I rather the like the blue ones and in any case all along our river we have plenty that have quite a dramatic mix of colour so we get to enjoy those too.

When it rains heavily, our back garden path gets submerged and becomes a rocky swimming pool, which I quite like to watch in the heavy rain. Fortunately it drains away by itself quickly once the rain stops – allowing us to get on with the endless tasking of weeding! (And yes, unsurprisingly those weeds do seem to love all this heat and water).

Today is Children’s Day in Japan, a.k.a. こどもの日 or kodomo no hi. This is the last of the public holidays that make up Golden Week, so trains are crowded today as people make their way back home after their week’s holiday. (You can tell they are not Aussies – if they were you can be sure a lot of people would have a pre-planned sickie for Friday tomorrow and enjoy that and the weekend to milk the holiday season for all it’s got).

Children’s Day is actually really mostly about boys, since girls get in first with their own 雛祭り hina-matsuri, or Japanese Doll Festival. The girls day festival is something most celebrated with elaborate oramental (and very expensive) displays of traditionally dressed dolls inside the house. Boys Day on the other hand is celebrated with 鯉幟 (koi-nobori), which are koi (carp fish-shaped) streamers that are erected to fly high above houses with sons.

The carp streamers are put up around late April in anticipation of Children’s Day, which always falls on May 5. The full display that gets put up is actually quite a structured thing, with various usually metal wheels and bits and pieces at the very top, followed by a dragon streamer (that looks like a windsock), then a large black koi representing Dad, a somewhat smaller red one (or sometimes pink) for Mum, then a blue one for the son.

If the family has managed to defy both Japan’s low birth rate and the odds of having a girl as well, then additional koi are added for each additional son after the first – smaller in size representing relative ages, with the subsequent koi being green and then either purple or orange depending on regional custom.

Being a son-less household at this point, I can’t show you a picture of our koi-nobori since we don’t have one. What I can share instead is a story from the neighbourhood.

Koi carp swimming in "our" river

Firstly, it is worth knowing that we live by a small river, which in the usual Japanese fashion is concreted up on both sides. Fortunately though, it is one of the nicest little “urban rivers” I have come across, with surprisingly clear water and very well maintained garden along one side that runs for quite some way. Along with various ducks, geese and other birds that appreciate the river, there is a population of koi that seem to live happily too, and I always enjoying watching them swimming when I walk past.

In late April, I could hear a number of people talking nearby for an extended period, and finally my curiousity got the better of me and I went to see what was going on. In a nearby carpark where around 10 people working on assembling carp streamers. This story was actually going to be one of (gentle) mockery, because the group, who could be most politely described as “not likely to have had sons any time in the past several decades” were working at an excruiatingly slow pace. Indeed several hours passed without any evident progress.

Eventually though, the group was on the move and Keira and I were caught as if on their fishing lines and couldn’t help but tag along and see what was happening. It turned out that rather than decorating their individual homes, as would usually be the custom, these koi nobori were going to hang proudly over our river. I felt some pangs of guilt for my overhead “spy shot” of the elderly group and plot line I was concocting for my blog post; they turned out to be extremely friendly and welcoming – as well as more than able to haul the rather heavy ropes over various obstacles, climb telegraph poles, wade through the river and other challenges before their job was done.

In the end they had transformed our stretch of the river into a lively, brightly coloured place with the koi appearing to swim in the wind. Plenty of onlookers and kids on the way home stopped to admire their work (both at the time and over the subsequent days).

Keira, too, got lucky and loved to watch their handywork, especially since one lot of koi-nobodi are right outside her window, so she had no chance of an afternoon nap while she was watching from the front row seating her bed provided.
I feel very fortunate that we live in a neighbourhood with people who care enough to do things like this, or to tend to the public-space flower beds in their own spare time.