Good afternoon,
It is finally only 26°C in Tokyo, and the humidity level is down to 40 %. Walking outside no longer feels like the bravest act of my day. A quick trip to a grocery store is just one of the mundane daily tasks and does not carry the same level of thrill as walking in a rainforest. So I can safely say that, after three months, we are in the clear.
Summers in Japan, particularly in its big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, are brutal. When I first moved to Japan, one wise person told me that I should forget all I knew about the beloved summer season. “In Japan, summers are for work”, he said, “the kind that can only be performed indoors”. At the time, it did not sound like bad news. Despite hailing from Turkey - a peninsula enjoying extensive coastlines along the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas - I have never been much of a summer person. Unlike fall or winter, I always found summer to be a very commanding season that always requires cheerful mood and does not give you much room to feel any way you like. Melancholy in the summer feels like a crime, not a mood.
But maybe not so much in Japan. In early June, the entire country (except for Hokkaido) enters the rainy season, which lasts until late July. It is nothing like the monsoon season in Southeast Asia when the daily weather forecast promises (and often delivers) a mixture of sunny skies (with beautiful rainbows) and downpours. It is a grim, persistent rain, and there are definitely no rainbows. So instead of the cheesy cheerfulness that summers in my home country impose on us, melancholy, anger, and boredom are all acceptable and, to some extent, expected summer moods in Japan.
Then comes the "real summer", aka the survival season, when there is no room for any kind of feeling. Your sole purpose is to stay alive. After a long break of six years, I started a new full-time job in Tokyo this summer - a new work, new environment, new colleagues, and all the usual challenges that come with it. But with humidity averaging between 75% and 85% throughout August and September, the most (and possibly only) difficult part of adapting to my new job was making it to work alive every morning. It was that bad.