Screaming sirens

Over the past few days, we seem to have entered siren season. There have been an excessive number of screaming sirens rushing past our house.

It started on Thursday when a cavalry of fire trucks flew past, decelerated and parked themselves across the street from Ban Ban Bazaar, a dry goods shop a block down the road. With the good timing that comes of procrastination, I had some dry goods on my shopping list, so I went out to buy them and to spectate with the crowd of neighbors. No idea what was going on, though. There was no smoke, no fire; I couldn't even tell which building the firemen were interested in. They were milling around as aimlessly as the onlookers.

Later that afternoon and every day since at least one each of police, ambulance and fire trucks have rifled past at top speed and top volume. Sirens aren't enough in Japan, the drivers also have a loudspeaker system that they use to continuously ask the drivers and pedestrians to move out of the way. It's always very polite, of course, when you can understand the rapid, overamplified speech.