It has been a brutal summer. While much of western Japan has suffered from heavy flooding, the rest of the country has experienced severe heat waves: The city of Kumagaya, located in Saitama Prefecture made headlines for its record breaking temperature of 41.1 degrees Celsius.
While growing up, I spent several summer vacations in Saitama, as my grandfather moved his family and business there from Tokyo back in the 1940s to avoid air raids. Just north of Tokyo, landlocked Saitama tends to get especially hot and humid in the summer, since most of the inhabited areas are located in valleys surrounded by hills or mountains.
As kids, my cousins, sister and I would run around all day in the sun until we had sweated so much that our clothes would be caked with salt. We would down gallons of mugicha (barley tea) and bowls of kakigōri (shaved ice), and my grandmother would urge us to eat one umeboshi (salt-preserved plum) per day. In the evenings, we'd devour watermelons that had been cooled by dangling them in a bucket in the well.