Typhoon claims summer in Japan

Tokyo, Japan – The fifteenth typhoon of the year pounded its way across Okinawa last week, causing airlines to cancel flights to the islands. Further up along the Japanese mainland the typhoon took another victim, summer. Summer was only six weeks old.

After a arriving late in the Land of the Rising Sun, summer only really took hold from the wet, cool spring a few weeks ago. Making full use of its capabilities to turn rush hour trains, apartments, offices, phone booths and any other structure partially or fully closed into a sauna, the summer looked as though it was going to continue for some time. Indeed, even the ever-accurate weather forecasts were predicting a long period of hot weather and skimpy clothing. Yet, despite all of predictions to the contrary, typhoon Choi-wan skirted up the east coast of the Japanese archipelago and swept summer handily away.

“Summer was just here only yesterday,” one mourner in Tokyo’s Harajuku area lamented while clutching a cheap vinyl umbrella, “and today…just nothing, gone like it was never here.” As the storm pushed northward and out to sea, its trailing arms drenched the area in a miserably cold rain, pushed by chilling winds.

Memorial services in the form of bitter complaining were held immediately and will probably continue through Tuesday.