The Endurance Season

The rains were still falling when the weather app told me they were about to stop. Mid-July, the JMA announces tsuyu-ake for Kansai^[1], and the announcement always feels like a starting gun rather than a finish line. The grey lifts. The puddles dry. And then the real season begins, the one nobody warns you about, because the brochures are too busy selling you cherry blossoms in April.

Summer here is not a holiday. It's a thing you get through.

You wait for the tsuyu-ake announcement the way you'd wait for a verdict, and the ending is not a relief so much as a transfer of complaints. You step outside on the first clear morning and the light is enormous, the sky scrubbed blue. For about a day, it's lovely. Then the temperature settles in and stays, and you understand that the rain was the easy part.

The cicadas confirm it. In Kansai the loud one is the kuma-zemi, the bear cicada, and it doesn't do the gentle two-note call you hear in films. It's a flat electric drone that starts around seven in the morning and saws away until the light goes. The first one is almost a novelty. By the second week you've stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing a fridge, and the only time it registers is the brief moment one stops and you notice the silence it leaves.

Sweating Standing Still

Tokyo gets the headlines, but I'm in Hyogo, and the Kansai version has its own cruelty. The sea holds onto the day's heat and hands it back overnight, so the air never properly cools. August highs sit in the mid-thirties, the humidity climbs towards ninety per cent, and the low at three in the morning is still around twenty-five. You don't get the night off.

The numbers got worse, not figuratively. The summer of 2025 was the hottest Japan has recorded since 1898, running 2.36 degrees above the long-term average^[2]. Thirty observation sites topped 40 degrees, and one town in Gunma hit 41.8, a new national record. I'm wary of treating a single bad year as a trend, but four summers in a row of "hottest on record" stops reading like coincidence.

The detail the travel guides leave out is that you sweat standing still. You walk four minutes to the station and your shirt is wet. You stand on the platform in shade and it gets wetter. The train arrives chilled to twenty-two degrees, your glasses fog as you board, and by the time your body has adjusted it's your stop and you step back into the wall. The whole day is a series of these transitions, indoors to out, cold to hot, and none of them are comfortable.

So the city adapts in small visible ways. Parasols, carried by men now as well as women, less a fashion statement than a portable patch of shade. Neck fans clipped to bags. The hand towel everyone keeps to mop their face. The instinct, after a few summers, to cross to the shaded side of the street without thinking about it, and to time the supermarket run for after dark.

The Air-Con Calculus

Every summer becomes a quiet negotiation with the electricity bill. Household power runs around 35 yen per kilowatt-hour, and a single person running the air conditioner hard can push a monthly bill to six or eight thousand yen^[3]. Nudging the thermostat up a single degree saves something like ten per cent. Is one more degree worth losing an hour of sleep over? It's the sort of fact that lodges in your head and has you hovering over the remote at midnight, doing arithmetic instead of sleeping.

The trouble is the nights. When the low never drops below twenty-five, you can't open a window and coast. The air-con runs while you sleep or you don't sleep, and the bill reflects it. The government ran electricity subsidies through the summer of 2025, a couple of yen per kilowatt-hour shaved off the worst months. A small subsidy is a quiet admission. When the state starts discounting the cost of not overheating, the heat has become a line item.

The Konbini Stop

The 7-Eleven on my corner earns its keep in summer. Not for anything I buy. For the air.

There's a specific relief in the automatic doors sliding open onto a wall of cold, and I've stopped pretending I'm there for the onigiri. Nobody needs a third trip to the konbini by four in the afternoon. You buy a 150-yen something you didn't need so the ninety seconds in the chilled aisle feel earned, stand in front of the drinks case longer than the choice requires, and then face the worse part, which is going back out. The doors open, the heat lands on you like a held breath, and the glasses fog all over again, in reverse.

The hydration shelf has its own grammar. Pocari Sweat at about 150 yen, the everyday option. OS-1 next to it at around 169, an oral rehydration solution marketed almost like medicine, the bottle you reach for when you've genuinely overdone it. And by the register, the salt tablets and salt sweets, sodium and potassium and citric acid dressed up as confectionery. Somebody always keeps a bowl of them out by July, and dipping into it becomes as automatic as the air-con remote.

Cold Things, Loud Things

The food tilts cold and stays there. Kakigori is the headline act, a mound of shaved ice that runs three to five hundred yen at a festival stall and climbs past two thousand at a specialist shop that takes it far too seriously and is right to. The cheap version is bright syrup over ice, melon or strawberry or the blue one that's a colour rather than a flavour. The expensive version is Uji matcha and real fruit and condensed milk built in careful layers. Both end the same way, a brief ache behind the eyes and a puddle of sweet meltwater at the bottom of the bowl.

The rest of the summer table follows. Cold soba on a bamboo mat with dipping sauce becomes a weeknight default. Barley tea, mugicha, replaces hot tea in every fridge in the country. The rooftop beer gardens open on the department stores, ninety minutes of all-you-can-drink under an open sky, and there's an obvious absurdity in sitting outdoors to escape the heat that nobody seems to mind once the first cold one arrives and the city is laid out seven floors down.

And running under all of it, the cicadas and the furin. The wind chimes go up on eaves and shop awnings, glass bells meant to ring in a breeze, on the theory that the sound itself reads as cool. Can a small glass bell actually talk your body into feeling a degree cooler? I can't say. But after a few summers the sound does something anyway. Not cooling. Gentler than that. Evidence that someone, a long time ago, decided beauty was a reasonable answer to discomfort.

A New Word for It

For years the official term for a brutal day was mōshobi, a day that reaches 35 degrees, coined in 2007. The summer of 2025 forced a sequel. In 2026, nearly two decades later, the JMA added a rung above it: kokushobi, a "cruelly hot day", 40 degrees or more, chosen by public vote with more than two hundred thousand people weighing in^[5].

When a country holds a vote to name a category of weather it didn't used to need, that tells you where this is going more honestly than any single statistic.

Summer ends slowly, the way it began. September stays hot. The kuma-zemi thin out, and the late cicada that signals the season turning falls quiet one morning without announcing it. Then you walk to the station and arrive without your shirt sticking to your back, and you realise the air has shifted by a single degree. It isn't autumn. It isn't quite summer either. After three months of getting through it, the pause is enough.