Hints of Spring in Tokyo

Wandering around over the last day or two and the weather has definitely felt a little warmer, not that we are breaking out the flip-flops just yet, but there are hints of spring in Tokyo such that if you have to take off a mitten for a minute to get some change out of your pocket you don’t instantly feel the digits drain of blood, which is encouraging.  (Cue snowfall brought about by this post!) The photo is of the oranges (mikan) growing on a tree I pass on my way to work each day. In Japan, they are a winter fruit, but the flash of orange against the trees gave me a lift and made me think of summer.

Recently one of my students mentioned a poem by Shelley which she told me was very popular in Japan, and which ends with the words:

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

She told me it was also encouraging, because however much you feel as if you are in the depths of a Narnian endless winter, the longer it goes on for, the closer you must be getting to spring.

And bearing all that in mind, I was further encouraged when I looked into the poem, Ode to the West Wind, a little more (ok, looked it up on Wikipedia!) and read that it was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819, not long after the Peterloo Massacre.  The spring he is anticipating is not only the temporal one, but also an awakening to reform and revolution, with the wind bringing a message of change as it travels.

So it is with a fervent hope that winds can bring changes to reach us all, along with the hints of spring in Tokyo we have missed out on over the colder and darker months.