Umbrella Warfare in Tokyo

When it comes to umbrellas in Tokyo, I’m usually the one left standing in the rain.

Tokions, have a way of always having rain protection when they need it. I look outside in the morning and always guess wrong. You don’t notice people carrying around undeployed umbrellas when it’s not raining, or even just before it starts raining. So I’m not really sure where they are hiding them. Maybe pants come with specially stitched umbrella compartments. That would be pretty Tokyo style.

Walking down Omotesando, as soon as the first drop hits the freshly scrubbed sidewalk, a sea of umbrellas spring into bloom like some futuristic lilly pond of semi orbs.

While Tokions are smooth in deploying their umbrellas, it devolves into utter urban warfare once they are extended. There is widespread disregard for personal space as umbrella spkes twirl, dart, and sometimes even seem to stab at eye level.

It is a 6 foot five man’s hell. Constantly dodging the unaware whims of these frenzied spikes. It’s like the reckless abandon of the morning subway, only with legalized weapons in hand. I think umbrella time is another one of these unspoken aggression outlets, like the Friday night karaoke binge or morning subway rioting. Casualties would never include a majority of the population of a certain height. It is clearly a natural selection aimed at minimizing the surplus population of oversized foreigners.

Consider me dually offended…

Further umbrella hysteria can be seem the morning after a storm, when the sidewalks and storm gutters are littered with busted umbrellas, mostly of the clear variety. Disposable as the night. A striking visual reminder of the hyper-consumerist utopia that Tokyo is.

I’ll keep checking the weather and going with my ill rain attuned gut, but I’m still hoping that Apple will release the iBrella so that I never need to carry around an old school analog style umbrella any more.

This Oregonian can’t roll that way.