umbrella: an anthropological record
The umbrella in Japan is a disposable commodity; everyone owns one, if not several. Tossed into storefront racks and forgotten, left in restaurants and stations, collected and traded, stole and borrowed, designed with genders and personalities in mind, they are like character cards for the Japanese personality.
This is no Seattle, where the bumbershoot is a symbol of the weak-minded and the typical commuter braves the daily drizzle in daywear or, at best, a goretex hoodie. In Japan, an umbrella is mandatory. This is the realm of the umbrella in rain OR snow. Some sensitive-skinned asians carry them even on sunny days.
Forget or lose your umbrella? Buy a new one immediately, they're on sale everywhere! Or better yet, if yours was pilfered, simply pinch another umbrella in a storefront stand where it waits for the owner within. More innocently, pretend you dropped it HERE and claim another floater from the hundreds waiting at any lost and found counter. But don't go out in the rain without one.
Red, blue, black, pink, orange, transparent, opaque and patterened, these tiny canories pepper the streets on rainy days. In a sea of umbrellas, the already crowded sidewalks of Tokyo become even more like the dangerous streets. Umbrella-toting pedestrians, partitioned off into bubbles of safety beneath bumbershoots, no more heed their neighbor than if they walked the streets alone. Under the umbrella, beset by a mask of anonymity, the pedestrians, in ones and twos, become like cars driving on a rush-hour highway. The flowing river of color, though beautiful, is as impersonal and dangerous as the ocean itself.
Pushing along in an anonymous sphere, one walks a rainy Tokyo street self-aware but impassive. With an umbrella, one is immune. Not only to the rain but also to everyone else. The rainy day weapon of choice is the umbrella... and in this city it's best to be armed. Though traffic in the river-street-sidewalk proceeds at a crawl, no one heeds the other vehicles. In this commute, there are no laws of traffic except the rule of flow. Break flow and you risk extremeties to hook or puncture. Fear for the lives of the too tall, beware the too short and pity those who try to walk at a reasonable pace. There are no turn signals, no brake lights, no horns and no sense except that of common courtesy, which is more often than not forgotten.
So beware rainy days in Tokyo, for the sea of ebbing color bears its own unique dangers. Though the rain rolls off the canopy and away from the bearer of the umbrella, don't chance the sea without your own bumbershoot-- for those who carry umbrellas also carry countless spines reaching for the eyes and the flesh of the unfortunate, the weary and the wet.
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I confronted my Anthro prof. She fully admits that she doesn't know much about swords and claimed that a friend of hers told her a while back how to determine if a sword had been well-used or not. I'm slightly confused, because she agreed that a katana's hamon has nothing to do with this wear and tear but she STILL gave that VERY INCORRECT impression to students yesterday. I give her some points for admitting her mistake but I don't forgive her entirely because she still decided to talk her way out of it. As much as I think it possible that some katana may show signs of use, I don't think any of these museum pieces would have been the kind of sword carried by a man who retained chip, scrape or scratch. So, she's on probation for now. The challenge still stands.
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