My daughter is off to Hawaii this week on a school trip with her classmates. Japanese people and Hawaii go together like peanut butter and jelly or sushi and wasabi, and if you can find a Japanese person who has never been there it’s quiet an achievement. (Mrs. J-List has been 7+ times and is quite an expert, knowing exactly what kinds of leisure activities you can find on each island, how to bargain for lower prices in shops by pretending to be Korean, and so on.) Because the trip is happening just a few weeks after the U.S. action against Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, the school is taking extra precautions to safeguard the students from a terrorist attack. Which strikes me as patently ridiculous since there are no terrorists in Hawaii, just a lot of nice people with colorful shirts and a heightened appreciation for the taste of Spam®. The chance of dying in a terrorist attack this year are 1 in 9.3 million, compared with 1 in 420,000 for death by falling out of the chair you’re sitting in right now, or 1 in 7000 for dying in an automobile accident. I wonder if my daughter’s school is taking strict action against these more serious threats, installing special fall-proof chairs and lowering the speed limit to 5 km per hour around the school? Somehow I don’t think so.
The Japanese go with Hawaii like bento and rice.
