The Japanese police are as worried as I am.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve walked through New York City at night and during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and through London on New Year’s Eve and never been bumped into. In Japan, I’ve been hit several times by people with odd senses of personal space and/or bad depth perception and have been hit by bicycles a few times.

This was in the pre-smartphone era. Now we have Pokemon Go and I am afraid.

The Japanese are already, um, inattentive when it comes to walking and using smartphones (and, in some cases, cycling and using smartphones). Pokemon Go could lead to the apocalypse and it’s best I stay in doors.

Having observed the results in other countries, the Japanese police have issued “Don’t Be a Moron” warnings to Japanese Pokemon fans now that Pokemon Go has been released.

The first injury happened almost immediately and even the company I work for has issued a warning. I’ve heard reports of people almost being hit by cars and of people slipping on escalators. There’s also some concern that the somber area around the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome could become a Pokemon hunting area.

I’m personally waiting for the first reports of people falling off train platforms and of people trespassing on the Imperial Palace grounds to get some rare creature.

Because school only recently let out and I have to work tomorrow (er, today at the time of this writing) I’m still not sure what day it is.

For all I know, I may have missed the meeting.

Part of the problem is that, except for Sundays, tomorrow, and the coming House Arrest phase of the summer, there isn’t much for me to do. The other part of the problem is it’s really easy to establish a bad habit where nothing much gets done.

I’ve been trying to use the time to finish some unfinished projects but, of course, I came up with an idea for another one which I started working on which, of course, defeats one of my goals for the summer (finishing unfinished projects).

The other goal is to get out ahead of this blog by readying a few reviews in anticipation of a trip to the in-laws.

Unfortunately, there have been complications in the form of us babysitting for a neighbor which throws off a plan to exercise in the afternoon and then take a short nap before continuing work on the unfinished project.

Still, I’ve got better habits established. Just barely, though. I’ll see if I can ruin them completely by the end of the week.

My daughters used to shoot my face, so I’m not too surprised by the Pokemon Go phenomenon. I’m also only a little surprised it hasn’t been released in Japan yet.

As a rule, whenever you read a writer going on about “the Japanese special relationship to technology” or about how Japan is 20 minutes in the future when it comes to technology you can be assured of a couple things:

1) The writer is full of crap.
2) The writer never left Tokyo.
3) the writer never took a local train, only bullet trains or the Tokyo metro and had local help to do it.
4) the writer didn’t try to use WiFi outside the hotel or had a pocket WiFi system.
5) the writer went to a game center.
6) the writer is merely recycling cliches because everyone knows about the special relationship and the writer can’t think of anything else to write about.
7) See number one.

In fact, except for a brief spurt of being out in front with cellphone technology in the pre-iPhone days, Japan usually lags behind in technology use. Government offices still use fax machines and forms have to filled out by hand in triplicate; the school where I work still uses OCR cards for final marks; and until very recently, the train system still required multiple paper tickets for travel, even on the bullet trains. (Actually, it still does, but the system is getting more streamlined.)

The only place the Japanese get out in front of the West is with game technology. A few years ago, our daughters’ Nintendo 3DS systems could take my picture and put it into a game that let the girls chase multiple versions of my face around our apartment and shoot my faces out of the sky and off the bookshelves. My face had monster expressions, including open mouthed roars when the “boss” version of my face showed up.

(Note: as much fun as this “shoot daddy” game was, it was kind of creepy in retrospect.)

However, Pokemon Go will only hit Japan tomorrow (as of this writing) and from what I’ve heard they are expecting a huge, internet breaking response. (Keep in mind, Japan has broken Twitter before, and is a good place to test servers.) (Also, invest in McDonald’s Japan because they are the first sponsor.)

Because no one swarms on to a fad like the Japanese, I don’t fully understand why they didn’t test the system here first. Perhaps Nintendo didn’t think it would catch on here and wanted to attract some attention overseas, counting on the Japanese tendency to want to copy the West’s fads to build interest here.

Either way, McDonald’s restaurants could get crazy soon. I also expect to hear stories of people falling on train tracks.

Despite yesterday’s predictions, I did manage to get stuff done. Most of it, though, involved consumption.

I was hoping for bad weather as I often let that make my go/no go decisions for me, but the weather people, to a person, described the weather with their arms out to their sides, puzzled looks and “yes, really, probably, your guess is as good as mine”. The only thing they agreed on was that it would be hot and humid. (In their defense, it was.)

I shortened my planned trip, although I did have to go to a couple banks because “pay day” and then did some shopping. I also ate too much at lunch. (More on that in a future review.) Then I did shopping for healthier snacks. (I’ll write more about that this in a couple weeks but the preview is I’ve recently begun slipping on snacks. My weight hasn’t gone up, but I can feel the physical difference with the sudden rush of sugar.)

After getting home, I turned on the air conditioner and sat down and did very little. She who Must Be Obeyed came home and pointed out it was raining and that it was my fault. (Actually, not noticing it, because the windows were closed because the AC was on was my fault, according to her, anyway.) Then, to remind me of life in Kansas, the weather decided to cycle through different seasons: it was sunny, rainy, sunny again, then dark and ominous.

While it was dark and ominous, SWMBO drove me to the post office to mail ink.

After we got, back, it changed to dark and scary, but when the rain came, it wasn’t that hard. In fact, we were very lucky most of the bad weather missed us.

Tokyo, however,  was apparently hit by at least three of the Biblical plagues, with “nasty rain” being the main one. Yes, that’s a Biblical plague. Look it up.