tokyo wonderland 02 whats happening in rainy season in tokyo

we usually have rainy season from the first half of june to the mid of july in tokyo, yet this year its arrival was about two weeks earlier. i really dont like this time of the season for two reasons, firstly, of course because of bad weather, and ridiculously unpleasant humidity. whats worse, although its getting really hot already, the stupid (yet reasonable) energy saving campaign has made us hesitate to use AC, and my unpleasant-index is rocketing up.

in the end of may, on a madly rainy sunday, i went for a nice tokyo tour with chinese and dutch friends from my master program in sweden, dutch friends brother, and chinese friends husband. the rain was heavy enough to motivate me to show them somewhere indoor but it turned out that there were not many indoor exciting touristy spots around here, except nice (and costly) museums and shopping malls that my friends werent so interested in. so we just walked around shibuya-harajuku and shinjuku although the rain was bad enough to make the netherlands sunk:)

what good about rainy days in tokyo is that we are supposed to be able to see how resilient to the natural disaster tokyo is. (although the day of the earthquake totally paralyzed the city, the magnitude of the disaster was exceptionally chaotic so lets not count it.) the sewage disposal system is well-prepared and reliable enough to make traffic run smoothly and urban fabric cannot be damaged by ordinal heavy rain.

although we were totally soaked, nothing really disturbed us except rain until we came to a semi-underground path, which connects east and western part of the shinjuku station. this path is the only shortcut available between two main roads penetrating the railroads, which are like 500meters distant from each other. when people need to travel about shinjuku from east to west, thats the most useful and common choice.

after having a dinner together in western part of shinjuku, we headed east via the path. but we couldnt. apparently some trash were stuck to the drain making the sewage system numb, and it could no longer handle the amount of rainfall. and this is what happened there then.

apparently, just a heavily rainy day reveals that human creation cannot compete with mother nature, let alone earthquake and tsunami. some might say that this rain fall was also rather exceptional, but this guy who was blocking the path told us that this kinda thing happened several times a year or so, so nothing exceptional. just a heavy rain.

what ive learned is that we have to be smart to cope with nature, not compete with it.