IT IS freezing cold and snowing across most of Japan, but the country is engulfed by what many fear will be its worst hay fever season.

Just one week into the new year and the runny noses are nothing to do with colds: Japan’s 20 million hay fever sufferers are feeling the dreaded symptoms that usually begin in the spring.

For the first time, doctors’ offices have started to fill up with sufferers in January and the nation’s chemists have had to reorganise their stores. Flu and cold cures have made way for anti-allergy treatments.

Dire predictions from the Pollen Association — a collection of doctors and scientists who monitor Japan’s growing hay fever problem — have also prompted widespread panic. Masks, nose filters, herbal teas and protective pollen goggles are selling fast as the afflicted seize on an increasingly diverse range of cures.

Koji Murayama, a senior member of the Pollen Association, has predicted that by March 2005 will have become the worst recorded year for hay fever sufferers. Pollen counts will, he says, be twice the normal levels throughout the year and 30 times that of 2002.

The problem arises from Japan’s huge population of cedar trees and is a crisis whose seeds were planted decades ago. During Japan’s explosive economic expansion that began in the 1960s, large parts of the country were deforested. In the 1970s, when the country became richer and more conscious of the damage that had been done to its scenery, it began a cedar-planting frenzy from north to south.

Thirty years later, the cedar saplings have grown into forests of mature trees, capable of pumping vast volumes of pollen into Japan’s skies. The cedar pollen, which provokes a particularly fierce type of hay fever, is at its peak because of the record high temperatures reached last summer.

Kimihiro Okubo, a professor at the Nippon Medical School Hospital and one of the country’s leading experts on allergies, believes that Japan can expect an average of 10,000 pollen units per square centimetre this year — a figure well above normal.

“It’s the first time I have seen this, but patients started coming to doctors in October and November last year with hay fever problems,” Dr Okubo said. “It’s January and there is a steady stream through our doors. I believe the increase in the number of sufferers may have something to do with food we eat, the change of modern diets and the fact that traditional foods are not eaten any more.”

Dr Okubo is advising Japanese media groups to begin to publish daily pollen forecasts from mid-January. The Health Ministry has started a website telling people about the early advent of the hay fever problem.

The freak hay fever season has provided a lucrative start to the year in Japanese stores. The Christmas decorations have barely come down and already shop managers have a perfect theme for their January sales drive.

A spokesman for Tokyu Hands said: “We now stock almost 200 items relating to hay fever and we set up the department earlier than ever. We had to do it because we were receiving so many requests from customers.”

There are centuries-old “cures” for hay fever. Many Japanese favour a tea made from the heartleaf plant — while others believe that relief lies in a tea made from the leaves of the cedar tree itself.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president