Sunday afternoon

It's a warm, peaceful Sunday in my neighbourhood. I've been sitting on my verandah in the sunshine and eating leftover rice wrapped in seaweed and drinking miso soup, watching the white butterflies darting in and out of my neighbour's large crop of red opium poppies. I don't think it would be possible to grow such a large crop of poppies in your garden in New Zealand without someone ripping them off to convert into something illegal. A shame, because they are so pretty against the blue sky. In Eurasia there is a legend that the Buddha cut off his eyelids to stop himself from nodding off, and where they fell to the ground a plant grew which would bring sleep and terrible dreams to those who used it. Perhaps my neighbours suffer from insomnia. The drug laws in Japan are very strict, for example possession of marujuana is pretty much on a par with possession of cocaine, but deep in the countryside there are plenty of farmers who harvest wild cannabis for medical or personal use. This is an old practice which goes back to their ancestors, who used the plant as a natural and handy painkiller, for example for toothache. Also, while the drug laws are very strict for certain substances, other addictive substances ie. alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco. are widely used. Still, the strict drug laws do seem to work - in the whole three years I've been here I have never heard of any of the students at my school using illegal drugs. I know the older ones drink, sometimes, and maybe some of them smoke, but that seems to be as far as it goes. Last year the vice-principal informed me and Mum (who was visiting) in very serious tones, that some students were in trouble because they had left a school baseball game to buy ice-creams. Upon which Mum whispered to me, 'If it had been the kids at my high-school, it'd have been much worse than ice-cream!'