LAUSR

Faithfull Laser Therapy readers, here we are at the end of September, 2017, and it’s my pleasure and honour to welcome you to the third issue of the twenty-sixth volume of the journal. Here in Japan we should now be approaching what the English poet John Keats called the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, in other words, autumn or fall, whichever term you prefer. However for us in Japan the weather has been a little topsy-turvy this year. In my previous Editorial for issue 26:2 I left you looking forward to our rainy season, to be followed by the stifling and muggy heat of summer which we counter with the cooling breezes wafted by our wonderful folding fans, editorialized in the previous issue. Actually, it hasn’t quite worked out like that. The rainy season was less rainy than was hoped, and summer, which started out briefly very hot and sunny, quickly deteriorated to being very wet and cloudy, but sadly, still hot and humid. In fact, our normal bounty of summer fruit and vegetables this year is very few and far between because there hasn’t been enough sunshine, not enough of my favorite “light and life”, so that quantities and quality have dropped, and of course prices have concomitantly gone up. This was exacerbated by Typhoon Noru in July which dumped more rain in one day over the landmass of southern Japan than is usually seen in a year. Of course Japan is not alone. At the end of August the state of Texas was inundated and lashed by the winds of Hurricane Harvey, recognized as one of the 5 most devastating storms to affect the USA in the past 120 years. I would like to be able to say with US President Donald Trump that global warming doesn’t exist, but I don’t think I can honestly agree: at least in Japan, our usual “mellow fruitfulness” of autumn is likely to be a little fruitless this year.