But I will never forget my first Japanese Summer.
Never.
Japanese Summer comes in stages.
Summer starts in June, but at this point, it's still pleasantly cool on a lot of days.
By the end of June, we entered THE WET SEASON. At first, it was pleasant. It became so warm that the rainy days became steamy and fragrant. You could literally feel the rain turning to steam as it fell on the pavement. The rice had started growing, and everything smelt perpetually like hot wet grass. It was beautiful. It kept raining. And... raining. It was common for it to be raining all day. It got so bad, that at one point, the rain didn't stop for days. Schools closed, people were evacuated, as rivers flooded, dams burst, and mountains slid across the wet terrain. West Japan was declared in a state of emergency, as the rain poured on, uncaring. Over 200 people died that week and 5 million people were evacuated.
The temperature continued to rise, and it went from warm to disgusting very quickly. By July, the temperature and humidity were close to unbearable. The weather forecasts often include the phrase "33 degrees but feels like 40 degrees". And this was so true. The Australian temperatures are technically hotter than Japan. But with the temperature combined with the crazy humidity, never have I suffered from the heat as much as I have in Japan.
As soon as you leave the house, even at 5am, your body becomes fairly instantly covered in sweat. We have aircon in 2 rooms in our house. We have to leave the aircon in the room that connects to our bedroom on all night, with the door linking the two rooms open so we can benefit from it. But this means that in the morning, when we open the bedroom door to go into the kitchen, we are smacked in the face with a thick wall of steaming hot air. The air is so hot you can feel its weight.
At this point, we started developing daily headaches, despite trying our best to keep hydrating in the constant sweat-producing heat. We soon found out that this is common, and the reason was that even if you drink 4 litres of water a day, you won't stop your body from feeling dehydrated in this heat unless you eat/drink extra salt and/or ions. Because you were losing so much of them from sweat every hour. Luckily, all shops had displays of the necessary salted and ionised sachets that you need to add to water to avoid this.
To make matters worse, both the school and the office don't turn the aircon on until a certain time, despite the fact that it's hot enough to warrant it at 5am in the morning. Getting changed was a tricky matter, with clothes sticking to your body. Working out was an even more disastrous affair, with rivers of sweat running down our limbs and pooling on the gym floor from even easy workouts.
After the rainy season stopped, we then entered typhoon season, which is currently still going. During this time, the weather became thankfully less humid, although the dry stretches are interspersed with days of heavy rain and crazy winds. At the moment we have typhoon 21 hitting tomorrow, and all train systems will likely be suspended. Which is greeeeat because I'll be working in Kobe, so I can only hope they'll be running again by the time I need to go home. I usually enjoy looking at the seasonal products in the shops, but the current seasonal display is canned food that people can stock in their cellars and cupboards with in case of emergency. That's the fun seasonal display... Yay, emergency rations!
I'll never complain about winter again after this Summer. I swear.
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