Summer Joy

It only makes sense, and this is truer if you can visualize what Tohoku looks like today seventeen months after the tsunami tore it apart.  Seasons change.  The only constant element is nature.  Life, growth, death, and rebirth is all around.  In nature, those of us in Tohoku see this daily.  While nature destroys, it also recreates.  My last trip up north made me realize this all the more.

Outside the apartment where I stay in Ofunato I see this everyday.  I only wish they could sing, a chorus of songs only sunflowers could manage to voice.  I would gladly wake up to singing sunflowers.  I would even wake up without complaint.

The reminder "life goes on" has never been clearer.  We want beauty in our lives.  I don't know anyone who doesn't want a bit of color in our daily routine.  Bright is good.  Cheerful is better.  Sunflowers capture summer joy like I've never felt before, and evidently I'm not alone.

Tohoku is awash with sunflowers.  The streets are lined with rows of their strong yellowness.  

Someone planted them, and I find this reassuring.  They're beautiful.  Tall, proud, showing off their colors, they bring joy.  Their faces scream, "Look at me! I'm pretty."  Summer is about the culmination of growth, what was planted in spring.  We harvest, appreciate, and admire what the season has done for us.

It's impossible not to grin around these flowers that exude happiness.  Clearly I am not alone in feeling this way.  Wanting to return to a sense of normalcy, that nature can bestow and not just ruin, the choice (deliberate or subconscious?) of many in Tohoku to plant flowers of joy, the epitomy of summer has not gone unnoticed.  I see grandmothers stopped on the sidewalk admiring the mustard-yellow petals.  They point at the bees on the brown faces of these flowers.  I stand back and watch, grinning once more at the fact there is joy once again here in Tohoku.

Peaches from Fukushima

There's simply no other way to put this.  No amount of money spent on advertising, neither on television nor in print, like these posters hanging in trains running through the Tokyo underground will ever convince me. 

And, I'm sorry about that.  But, and really, peaches grown in Fukushima?  An advertising campaign is supposed to make me go buy them?

They are grown with care.  The farmers in Fukushima "put our hearts and souls" into these peaches.  They're juicy and sweet.  So the posters tell me.  I'm sure they are grown with care.  I have no difficulty believing the farmers did everything in their power to pick the best, ripest, pinkest peaches to sell.  They might even be extra juicy.

But, and really, but they're grown in Fukushima.  People.  I can't.  I just can't. 

Can you really prove to me they're safe?  The radiation levels may have been measured and measured again.  I'm not actually coming out and saying I don't believe the results.  I'm just saying, again mind you, they're grown in Fukushima.

That the farmers in Fukushima need income I get.  That the farmers in Fukushima need hope I understand.  It's the getting from "wanting to help" part to "buying food raised in potentially radioactive soil" part that I have difficulty with.  This is why this ad blitz confuses me.  Do they really hope to change our minds?  My mind?

Here's the thing.  It is peach season.  And, white peaches here in Japan are something else.  There's no eating them without a towel in hand.  Juices drip down my chin.  They're practically messy they're so wet and full of pulp.  Peach season is summer.  Watermelon, barley tea, muggy weather, fireworks, mosquitoes, and peaches--this is summer in Japan.  That Fukushima is trying to be a part of traditional Japan, summer food, family fun, I want to help with this.  But, sorry.  Dear Farmers, I just can't do it.  I'll let you know if I change my mind.  'Til then.