I've been in Japan for a little over a year and a half, and I'm finally starting to understand a few of the little things I'd seen in movies or comics or cartoons or books before I came here. Take summertime, for instance. I can't tell you how many times I saw the exact same scene in movies or cartoons to indicate it was summertime: A couple of long shots of either farmers' fields or a suburban neighborhood. If it was the neighborhood, all the colors would be kind of washed out, if it was the field, everything growing seemed to be a kind of iridescent green. But no matter what, whether the movie was a comedy or a drama, if the cartoon was set in feudal times or at a school for robot pilots, there would always be two things: a total lack of movement in the scene, and the constant sound of cicadas. I couldn't figue out if it was just a cinematic shortcut, like a tumbleweed in a western or a minor chord in the soundtrack for the villain, or what.

Turns out that the feeling of summer in Japan can be concisely and accurately evoked with exactly those things. I thought the rainy season was hot, but what came next has been a shock. On the days when I did have to go outside between 11:00 and 4:00, I was usually the only thing moving. Or at least, the only thing stupid enough to be moving AND wearing a black suit. And the sound of the cidadas didn't become truly omnipresent until the end of the rainy season. I can hear them buzzing now. I could hear them buzzing all last night. And the day before and the night before.

Maybe I'd just taken it for granted that regional differences would keep everyone from assigning the same meaning to symbols. When I see film footage of kids playing in piles of red leaves and throwing horse chestnuts (not to be confused with "horse apples," by the way) at each other, it doesn't remind me of the feeling of Autumn at all, because it's totally outside of my experience of Autumn. And I'm fairly sure that filling paper bags with sand wouldn't make any of those Ithaca kids think of Christmas.

But the people in Tokyo and Fukui and Osaka and Kanazawa that I asked all seem to have the same resonses to the cicadas and the still scenes for summer. I wonder if it's because the island is small enough to share a similar climate for most of its area? Or maybe because so much of the media is produced in Tokyo and Osaka (sorta like the central part of Japan) that most of the easily identifyable symbols from this area would have been repeated again and again and distributed all over the country. I dunno. It's puzzling.

Kinda like a lot of life here.