Japanese weather....

The summer in Japan is unbelievably hot - and apparently this year it's especially so. All the veteran staff warn you that it's going to be bad, but I don't think anything can prepare you for just how sweltering it is. In Tajimi, the city nearby which I work in on Wednesday (lucky me!), the temperature got up to 40C while I was away. This is a record, one of the hottest summers ever. There are two main problems with Japanese summers. 1) They're incredibly humid; the feeling of oppression as you dash from one air conditioned building to the next is quite formidable and often it's only when you sit down and the negligible breeze made by your walking disappears that you realise how thick the air around you is. 2) Even though we're dashing about teaching kids, we still have to wear some semblance of a suit, which means trousers and a shirt are mandatory (but not a tie, at least not for kids' classes). So traipsing to the station with your trousers sticking to your legs is another fun part of the season - yay!

I'm not sure if there's any physiological basis for this, but it does seem that Japanese people don't sweat quite as much as us gaijin. Usually when it gets hot they have a little towel, like a flannel which they use to delicately dab the beads of sweat forming on their foreheads. Meanwhile, I'm literally dripping with perspiration like I've just passed a house brick or something - every once in a while you'll see some chubby Japanese guy (a rarity in itself outside of the sumo ring) with a damp patch on his chest, but by and large they seem to cope with the temperature pretty well. The hot weather does however provide an easy topic of conversation when in the local convenience store; the Japanese, like us Brits love to talk about the weather. Just using single words though - usually either "samuii" (cold) or "atsuii" (hot). I also looked up humid: "mushiatsuii" - check it out, one quick peek in the dictionary and I increased my vocabulary by a third!