Midsummer Again

There's a number 1 hit song on the charts now called "Midsummer Sounds Good" by possibly the most annoying pop group ever assembled, AKB48.  For those of you who are even slightly acquainted with Japan, then you most likely know this group and can skip over the rest of this paragraph.  For those of you who aren't that familiar with Japanese pop culture, here's my quick explanation: AKB48 is a ridiculously complicated pop assembly of around 60 no-talent young teenage to early 20's girls who are corralled and thrust before the Japanese public for their voting and buying pleasure.  I'm not quite sure how it works, but there is a voting system to decide who gets included in the group, and the group is even further split into teams ranging from the most to least popular.  The girls are then pitted against each other to vie for the top ranking, even though they have to pretend to be best friends and have slumber party pillow fights in their lingerie for their promotional videos.  I wouldn't have such a problem with them, but it creeps me out that their childishness, along with their sexuality, is emphasized in everything they do.  They prance around and squeal like little girls, but they're always wearing skimpy bikinis or lacy negliges when they do.  And they are consistently the most overexposed group of people in the media.  Which makes me uncomfortable considering the absurdly high number of perverts in this country.

Anyway, back to "Midsummer Sounds Good": it's another dumb turd of a pop song churned out of the Japanese music factory.  The gist of the lyrics is extol the pleasures of midsummer: the sound of the waves, the heat, the prancing around in your push-up bikini...really, that's about it.  I think it says a lot of midsummer in Japan that these are the best qualities they can think of, and two of them can only be experienced on a beach.  (Well, you can wear a bikini in the city, but...)  In short, midsummer sucks.  It's the beginning of what is arguably the most unpleasant season in Japan.  Tsuyu, or the rainy monsoon season, begins at this time, which brings on the oppressive humidity of summer, which in turn brings on even more torture.  First of all, there's the mold.  Then, there's the sour smell of clothes that can't get dry by hanging inside or outside. There's the constant risk of blackouts from everyone using their air conditioners at the same time (the risk is even higher this year due to the closing of nuclear power plants across the country as a result of the disaster in Fukushima).  And there's also the bugs, my gosh, the bugs (see my entry from last year titled "A Selection of Busy Bugs Buggin'" for reference).  Midsummer, in fact, does not sound good.

I grew up in Alabama, which is famous in the U.S. as being one of the most inhospitable places in the country during summer.  Spanish explorers died there from all sorts of horrible things when they first hacked through its wilderness and native peoples.  The bugs and humidity are equally as bad as that of Wakayama.  But for reasons I can't quite figure out, the Japanese summer feels worse.  Maybe it's because we waste electricity like its sources are infinite in the U.S., so we can use clothes dryers and air conditioners without a care in the world.  Air actually circulates in our houses, preventing mold and smelly clothing.  Sometimes I wake up in the morning in Japan, and I feel like I'm wading through the same stale air that's been stewing in my apartment for days, the same way people slog through swamps in my home state.

And yet, it's not all bad.  The sounds of midsummer actually do sound good.  Rice fields are flooded at this time of year, and thousands of frogs congregate in each one creating chirping, croaking choruses.  I've talked to some people who find even the frogs annoying, but I kind of like the racket they make at night.  There's also the deep verdant green that returns to the mountains and fields and the sweet musty smell of the new plants and the rotting ones underneath.  But those things don't sell pop songs.