This article does not deal with military activities around the Gulf war, but rather describes living next to a Japanese high school.
How do “desert storm” and Japanese high school fit together? Well, those of you who live (or have lived) next to any kind of school in Japan might know what I am talking about, but for the rest I am going to explain what bothers me. Japanese schools look pretty much the same, independent of their type (elementary, junior high, senior high) or its operating authority (i.e. public or private). Beside the box-shaped school building, almost all schools have a sport ground where gym lessons and festivals are being held. In the afternoon (and on weekends) different school sport clubs (soccer, baseball rugby, track-and-field, etc.) meet at that ground and either practice or have games/competitions against other schools. Thereby, more than 95% of the school sports grounds are not covered with grass or a Tartan track, which one would expect to find at a sports facility. Instead, almost all Japanese school grounds are just huge sand-boxes which have been compacted and levelled. I don’t know why a developed country like Japan, still maintains such shabby facilities as sports grounds for their kids, but that’s how things are here. To make things worse, those grounds have another annoying “feature” that affects people living in the neighbourhood of a school. Although the surface of a typical sport ground has been hardened over the years, such places turn into swampland during the raining season. Since raining season is soon to approach in Japan, one can see now janitors riding mini-tractors which pull huge and heavy rollers to compact the surface as much as possible. The drawback of this undertaking is that as long as it is not raining (or the ground is being irrigated) a small layer of sand can be found on-top of the solid material. However, the beginning of the raining season in Japan is usually characterized by strong pre-summer winds. And this is how the title of this post relates to high school sports grounds. Since we are living close to three (!!!) junior and senior high schools, one feels like being in the middle of the Sahara, rather than standing on its own balcony. When the wind blows these days, one can’t hang clothes outside and since doors and windows are not 100% tight, it happens that fine sand finds its way into our apartment. Calling the responsible high schools does not help much. Some turn on their sprinklers for a few minutes, but most of them don’t care about the sand storms that originate from their sports ground. Well, so much for “mutual respect”, from which people think that it is one of the pillars of Japanese society … 
