Perhaps the general public wasn’t fully aware that Japan was experiencing a sharp upswing in confirmed coronavirus cases, leading to the 7th and by far most extreme wave of the pandemic. Or maybe people just don’t care anymore.

I think it’s somewhere in between.

Last month saw the return of the Fukashi Shrine Festival, with stage performances and ritual prayers and all the pleasant trimmings of your typical Japanese summertime matsuri.

 

 

 

 

And like kids cooped up in the house too long the crowds descended on the shrine grounds.

 

 

 

 

Social distancing may be a thing of the past, but everyone – almost – was masked up.

My son was there among the hordes, wandering aimlessly, carelessly with his buddies from school. I didn’t see him in the hour I was there, but I could imagine the joy in his chest. Like all students, from pre-school to university, he has experienced a lessening of a life. Or would it be more accurate to say he hasn’t been able to experience the life that lay before him before the pandemic hit.

 

From what I’d seen and heard, the altering force of the pandemic was not as severe here in Japan as it was in other countries. After the initial prudent and judicious closing of school for a month in 2020, life has gone on – but with a caution that has taken away from the lives of children everywhere: the curtailing of after-school activities; the cancellation of academic, athletic and community events; the quietly-heeded requests for parents to refrain from allowing their children to go outside and play.

 

As we creep toward the third anniversary of the outbreak of the pandemic – and witness the worst wave yet to hit Japan – life seems, in spite of it all, to be continuing on. For someone who loves to travel; for one involved in the tourism industry; for a person who would much rather make his living outside than in, the end of the pandemic and the concomitant reopening of Japan’s borders to the rest of the world cannot come quickly enough.

In the meantime, that my children, that all children, can rediscover – or discover for the first time – the magic of the everyday lends more than fair consolation.