How to ruin a beautiful sunny Sunday with my family.

(The view from the Tozai line approaching Myoden Station.

As you can kind of  see, the sky is the colour of tobacco-stained

teeth.)

As the temperature here in Ichikawa reached the lower twenties today (that`s in Celsius), my wife and I decided to take our 3 year old daughter out to the park. We grabbed an onigiri or two and headed out to Funabashi-Hoten.

We had been there less than an hour, when I noticed the sky turn a horrid shade of dirty yellow. Luckily for me at this time I was wearing both sunglasses and a mask (to try to prevent any allergies) and I quickly made my family do the same.

This was because I`d heard a few of my students this week talk about a huge cloud of polluted air approaching from Beijing. I had never had thought that this air could have reached Kanto, but I wasn`t going to take any chances, so we packed up and headed home.

As you can see from the photograph above the cloud of pollution is from China and is made up of yellow sand from the Gobi Desert, which has always been a problem for Japan and something called PM2.5, which is dangerously small particle matter that can cause respiratory problems.

This article from the Japan Today website has actually been changed since reports earlier in the day and now claims it was dust storm that whipped up on the Kanto Plain. However looking at the photograph above I find it hard to believe.

Just take a look at this article on the effects of PM 2.5......