Lock Day

The Japanese have a practice of using the different pronunciations of the kanji for numbers to form other words. The classic example is 2 and 9 ("ni" and "kyu" or "kuu"), which normally would be ni juu kyu nichi (the 29th day of the month), but which becomes niku ("meat"). Some fastfood restaurants have "niku no hi" (meat days), where they serve burgers with extra patties on the 29th of the month at a slight discount.

Apparently, someone thought that "lock," pronounced as "roku" could be turned into "Roku no Hi" (6-9 day) on June 9th. I've never seen this done before, but as I was walking through Tenmonkan on Saturday, the 9th, on my way to the English school, I encountered this small display of lock and key systems for houses and apartment buildings, and banners announcing "roku no hi" (Lock Day).



I arrived right at 1:45 PM, and they were already starting to tear down the banners and put stuff into boxes. So, I'm really not sure who the intended audience was for this. It's another one of those "blink and you miss it" things.



They only had a few sample systems out to look at, but at least some of them were in see-through cases, so you could watch how they work as you played with the keys (a couple were electronic, and one was a double-lock combination that needed two simultaneous keys to operate).




I would have liked to have had more time to look at them more closely, but I needed to get to the school in 5 minutes. And, as I say, they were already doing tear down. The main thing, though, is that the symbolism on their banners for "6" and "9" seemed to have completely escaped everyone there...

Otherwise, nothing of any note this past weekend. Apparently, we're entering rainy season. In previous years, this meant 2-3 weeks of non-stop drizzle. This year, it's sporadic real rain and overcast skies. Promises to be a miserable (hot and humid, but mostly humid) summer.