So this is exactly why I changed the blog – here I am in the middle of an exam at the University That Must Not Be Named typing this drivel surreptitiously into my iPhone. I’d like to augment it with a photo, but seeing as I’m in a room full of young ladies and all phones in Japan by law must have an unstoppable loud shutter sound effect to deter the national male pastime of taking covert ‘upskirt‘ pictures, I’d probably better not.

Outside it’s 34C or for you older folks, 93F, and the transition from airconditioned haven to the natural world is like having someone throw a bucket of stinking slop in your face and then setting fire to your arse. It’s utterly foul and this year seems like it’s gearing up to be a real scorcher.

Now, throw into this dripping bowl the additional cultural predilection of the Japanese for an evening bath, et voila! you have clouds of some pretty ripe fragances in the nation’s classrooms and on the packed trains home when bodies have not seen soap and water for close to 24 hours. Pooey!

When I discuss this touchy subject with the natives of these islands and arrogantly proclaim the superiority of European ways in which one’s reeking bod, liberally basted in its own pungent juices after a night of tossing and turning, is hosed down of a morn in order to be clean and fresh for our day out in the world and its consequent meeting of fellow humankind, the Japanese are horror struck.

To them, sacrilegiously contaminating a clean futon cover of an evening when one is alone (or if lucky, with another) is infinitely more heinous a crime than to walk around all day stinking and unwashed among ones friends, associates and innocent passers by. And then they have the gall to say that all foreigners pong to high heavens! Bah!

So, anyhow, the reek in this particular room is none too bad because we are dealing with young ladies of the female persuasion, who are no doubt masking the fact that by now (11.30am) they are 16.5 hours into their wash cycle by spraying their parts with a melange of various perfumes and powders. Me, well, I am but 5 hours into mine, and as a consequence am smelling like roses, so clean in fact, that you could eat your dinner out of my shoes!

How different the predominantly male classes I teach elsewhere, when clusters of thirty or so pimpled uncommunicative lackwits slump over desks in the dark chthonic lairs of classrooms, too dull of mind to actually think of getting up and switching on the airconditoner, with the result that teaching has to be conducted with continual retching and gagging in the sweltering and fetid air.

And with that charming image I will bid ye a fond and smelly g’night, leaving you with an iPhone picture of an empty classroom, pong sadly not captured.

Note in the foreground the tools of the trade for us teachers – supply of caffeine, multi-coloured biro, and nerdy folder in which class registers knocked up on a computer are stored and updated, aforementioned pen being gleefully slashed through the names of those students deemed unworthy of credit.