Golden Dentist

Golden Week, the back-to-back string of holidays making up one of the big vacation times of the year is over. As it fell over a weekend it was unusually short this year, resulting in fewer foreign travellers and more people staying in Japan, to the joy of the domestic tourist industry and dismay of overseas travel companies. On a personal level, too, has the holiday been a good news-bad news kind of time. On the good side, a couple of friends from Tokyo came over for dinner to the joy of everybody. On the bad side, I've cracked a tooth, so I'm having a brush with the Japanese dental system on Friday evening (I already went once, for a temporary fix).

Now, I have nothing personally against the hard-working men and women of this challenging health profession, but I do have a reasonable fear of dentists. No, not "unreasonable"; a masked person holding you down in a chair while tearing your gums with steel implements and grinding down your teeth with power tools is a perfectly reasonable thing to be afraid of.

Tomorrow is not a time I'm looking forward to, in other words, and it's been showing. So yesterday Ritsuko brightened my mood instantly by pointing out that our favourite kushikatsu place is right on the way from the clinic, and why don't we stop there on the way back for dinner and beers? She knows me too well, I think.