Memo: The Hay Fever Japan Planted — Epoche B1
Memo: pollen season, February to April To: All staff, especially colleagues in their first Japanese spring. From: General Affairs (Ito). Date: 28 January. Subject: Kafunsho - what is coming, and how the office prepares. From about the middle of February the sneezing will begin, and it is not a cold going round. National surveys now find cedar-pollen hay fever - kafunsho - in nearly four people out of ten, so expect masks, red eyes and tissue boxes on perhaps a third of the desks until April. The season is worth understanding, because it is man-made and quite recent. After the war, Japan replanted whole mountainsides with sugi, cedar: fast, straight timber for rebuilding, until roughly a tenth of the country's land stood under planted cedar. By the time the trees matured, imported timber had become cheaper, so most of them were never cut. A cedar sheds its heaviest pollen from about thirty years of age, and the postwar plantations passed that age together. The first Japanese case reports of cedar hay fever date only from the 1960s; the generation that planted the trees rarely knew the illness their grandchildren treat as a season. Office measures, as every year: The pollen count is part of the weather report from February. On high days the windows stay shut and the air purifier runs in the meeting room. Uniforms and towels dry indoors on high days; pollen clings to cloth. Medicines work best started before the first symptoms - many people begin in early February. Ask a pharmacist, not the internet. Staff visiting the Sapporo office in March will notice the difference: Hokkaido has very little cedar, and Okinawa almost none. Questions: Ito, extension 331. References Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Delta.