Reflections on Weather

Today's Japanese Word of the Day:
天気
Tenki
(Noun: Weather)


I know you just love these Reflections posts, so I think I'm going to throw one more before the end. (Speaking of, we finished our last lecture today, the final test is tomorrow, and then there will be cleaning day and then airport day.) Today's topic? Weather.

The first thing I noticed about Japan upon sitting in the airport for a bit of time was the heat. Japanese are more concerned about saving energy than Americans, and so they don't blast the air conditioner as much as we do in the US, even in public buildings like schools and airports. The halls in the school aren't air conditioned at all, though thankfully the classrooms are.

I came during the summer, so the heat is a very defining factor of Japanese weather. It is hot, and it is humid.

I was expecting to hate the humidity a lot more than I do. I got used to it pretty quickly. It isn't overbearing, and it's probably been pretty good for my poor, dry, sensitive skin. The worst things about it are that it makes the heat a little more intense, and that on particularly bad days when you put your arm down on your desk in class, you end up with a peeling sensation when you raise it up. It can be just so sticky. However, it's hydrated my skin a little bit, and my hair is a lot less greasy than it usually is. That I can be thankful for.

This was the manner of life for the first two weeks. Very hot, very sunny, kind of humid. And then Osaka Castle day came around; for timeline purposes, the Saturday of the second week.

That is the first day the rain fell. It was a lot of rain, or at least it felt that way to us Utahns, as I reflected in that post.

It rained every day for the third week, except for Saturday. These days were much better temperature-wise. It was nice and cool, or at least cooler, because of the rain and the clouds. Even when it wasn't raining, it was overcast and gray. It is on these days that the humidity was the worst, though ultimately it didn't matter much because you were hiding under your umbrella to stay dry anyway.

We've been promised two typhoons over the past three weeks, and both of changed course and hit Tokyo instead. Boo. That means class wasn't cancelled and we haven't had the experience of being in a hurricane. We got some glancing rain from the outer edges of those storms instead. We also haven't had any earthquakes strong enough to feel hit Osaka.

Weeks four and five were kind of hit and miss with the weather. There wasn't a whole lot of rain, though we did have a couple of storms. The days that it wasn't raining were sometimes overcast, and sometimes sunny. The sunny days came more frequently near the end of the week.

Starting the weekend of week five, the heat hit with a vengeance. Hard. I have never experienced such heat in recallable memory. Since then, the sun has been so hot and the clouds so few that we've all been miserable. I'd rather have the rain.

And so, that wraps up the weather. In a nutshell: on the days it wasn't raining it was burning hot, and on the days it wasn't burning hot it was raining. The overcast, tolerably warm days were few and far between, but most often occurred in the days before and after a storm.

If only Japan could be green and dry.

~Amanda