In the Usbourne Book of the Future I used to read as a kid, there were two alternative pictures of futuristic life. One was of good looking people amongst shiny white towers being all happy and futurey. The other was a warning depicting a hellish world filled with jugger-naughts, smog and pollution. All the people were waring gas masks.

Skip forward a few decades to Tokyo and I find myself walking around Shinjuku wearing a surgical mask and sunglasses to protect me. It’s not so much from traffic pollution although it does play a role. It is the evil cedar pollen or 花粉 ( kafun ) in Japanese.

As one of the reported 20 million hay fever sufferers, this year has been absolute torture and the trains are packed with people like me, sneezing through their white masks and wishing they were somewhere else.

Tokyo isn’t in the top 10 most polluted cities in the world but the cedar pollen is a man made problem. After the war, there was a push to plant millions of cedar trees to deal with their timber shortage. Eventually imports became more economic and now Japan is left with huge swathes of cedar trees and the pollen that descends on the cities during February and March.

Pharmaceutical companies have been making a killing by supplying a range of products including, drugs, nose sprays, eye washes and even sprays to absorb the pollen from your clothes. I even saw a guy with a black hay fever mask looking like an urban hay fever ninja (which should be the name of my new band).

The Governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, stepped in with a plan to fell 1.8 million cedar trees back in 2006 which so far has had no discernible effect. If anything it has got worse.  Talking about dealing with the problem he said “The metropolitan government will take the first step” which presumably means “now go cut your own damn trees”.

All I can do is pray for rain to keep the pollen down or April when it all subsides. If I wear a mask, sunglasses and take the foreign non drowsy hay fever drugs I can almost cope. I feel like I’m in the movie “The Happening” where the trees give the humans a hard time, except with better acting.

Here’s to April.