The other day, for dinner, I had some slippery, slimy creatures that look like snakes. Eel. Summer is eel season in Japan. It's believed that eels are good for fighting summer fatigue. The demand is so high that eels are imported from Taiwan - live! The first lot of eels that arrived was shown on TV, with pretty stewardesses trying to catch and show them to the zillions of waiting TV camera crews, who it'd seem, don't have anything worthwhile to do. Eels from Taiwan! Even the Pope wouldn't dream of getting coverage like that in the Vatican.

Anyway, the eel crisis has been overcome thanks to Taiwan. What a boring country? One might tend to think. The biggest crisis around is eel. No mujahideens, no Veerappans, no Rajkumar fans, no Bajrang dals. Well, it's not all like that. I must say there are some interesting things going on in Japan that is mostly related to lunatic 17 year olds. Not the sweet 17, pimply romantic type. These are real freaks. In the last few months a bus was hijacked and a passenger stabbed to death. An old woman was killed by a jerk who wanted to find out how it felt. A mother was bashed to death using a baseball bat because she had some debt. All these crimes were perpetrated by 17 year olds. Does this country have a future or what!

Coming back to summer delicacies. There is something that resembles our halva called Youkan, which is a traditional sweet and like most Japanese sweets is made out of bean paste. Usually comes with chestnuts in them. Then there is soumen - a fine white noodle - usually eaten cold. The cooked soumen is cooled by putting it in a bamboo tub full of water, which is kept on top of ice. You take the soumen and put it in a small bowl with a watery sauce and ginger and onions and slurp it up. A more interesting version of this is the Nagashi soumen or flowing soumen. A bamboo is cut in half and kept in a slanting position so as to form a conduit that lets water flow down. This Master chef dude stands at the higher end of the bamboo with a bowl of soumen and then...and then… he takes a bit of soumen with his chopsticks and puts it on the bamboo duct. The water carries it down and you standing downstream stare at it as it flows past you and fall on the floor! No. You also have your own set of chopsticks with which you try to catch this soumen when it flows past. The important thing, if you believe the TV guys, is that the taste depends on the bloke who is putting the soumen in the drain.

The summer fashion scene also has come alive. Walking around Shibuya (the happening place for youth) last weekend, after a long time, I felt that nothing much has changed. There were the usual 100 billion youngsters jostling around in virtually less than a square kilometre of space. There were the usual noises of all these youngsters talking on their cell phones (probably trying to find a friend a few metres away). There were the usual Christian proselytisers trying to make people see the true path to the elusive Lord. Everything looked the same, except for the haute couture. With halter-tops being the in thing, lots of bare shoulders, backs and even some cleavages were on view. Some tanned to perfection, some tanned here and there with white marks left where the swimsuit straps prevented the tanning (uh!) and some kept away from the sunlight. Micro minis - one girl looked as if she had nothing on; platform shoes with 15-inch heels (this is not exactly new); guys in aloha shirts. Interesting.

In other parts of the town, especially where the hanabi (fireworks) season was on, it was nice to see the yukata (summer kimonos) clad women. July and August are the months for fireworks festivals. More than a 100 are held in and around Tokyo alone, the biggest being the Sumida River Fireworks festival. I had a friend who lived near the area and in whose apartment terrace we used to sit and watch the hanabis, drinking beer and eating sushis. He has since moved out of Japan and I don't think I can bring myself to watch the live broadcast of fireworks on TV. It reminds me of an old TV series on Ram in India where arrows used to meet and shed colourful circular light. Hey, Rum!

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