Wind and Weather

at left: ‘The Rainy Season’ (detail)
Illustration by Yaemi Shigyo
Seasonal greeting card series
1998-99
With humidity and temperatures rising, rain clouds overhead, and damp seeping in from every open – and closed – space in the house, it looks like time to talk about the weather. We enjoy a monsoonal climate here in Japan, which means that our weather is governed by the movement of seasonal winds. In the winter, cold air moves from west to east, bringing a great deal of snow to the Sea of Japan coast, and generally cooling things down in Fukuoka. This is the winter monsoon. At the tail end of the winter air masses, gusty winds blow over from the continent in spring. In recent years, these have come to include substantial quantities of dust from China: eroded topsoil blowing over from Manchuria. The summer monsoon – known in Japanese as tsuyu, or the rainy season – gets underway in June when the winds change direction and start to bring warm, moist air to Japan from the south. The national government has clearly defined rainy season standards, and issues a declaration every year for every region of the official beginning and end of the monsoon. This year’s rainy season began in Kyushu on the 10th of June; after a day or two of rain, we enjoyed about ten days of clear skies. We’re making up for that now. Apparently the climate gods encourage but later punish easy cynicism about Tokyo’s weather mavens.

All this damp is immensely significant for home life. Everything changes in the kitchen with the arrival of the monsoon: where once a box of crackers could keep comfortably on the counter for a month, now it becomes a soggy ruin in a few days. Books and papers left on the living room floor begin to curl. Every surface becomes tacky, and no amount of washing or polishing can bring back the cool smoothness of the winter floors. Moving in time from one season to the next is like passing through the veil of an enchanted waterfall in a children’s story: on one side, all is brightness and cool; on the other, darkness and damp. This is a rather gloomy sort of story: the space behind our waterfall is green and slimy, with the expected cast of shudder-inducing insects. These in particular compel a new rigor in kitchen behaviour. Outside the house we contend with mosquitoes and a wide array of plant-eaters. Our mosquitoes change favourite places every year, and this year clouds of them gather at dinnertime by the kitchen door. There are also grasshoppers, crickets, and white jumping things that secrete silky webbing and chew on the new growth of vulnerable plants.

While out in the garden, we must be on the lookout for bamboo, which sends up shoots after a shower and can get to be over two metres tall in a few days. We tolerate certain kinds of bamboo shoots, at least until they become tall enough to use: nothing beats a bamboo pole to hold up a tippy plant, or for hanging bags of onions under the eaves. But there is always the need for care and caution: last month I caught a shoot pushing away one of the bricks lining our front flowerbed. Bamboo is not the only plant to take advantage of both the warm, moist weather and the fact that the garden keepers tend to hide inside. We have opportunistic climbing vines, clover, a variety of grasses – including the bamboo grass that gives our neighbourhood its name – and that perennial favourite of all enchanted caves: moss.

I've heard it said that the history of civilization in Japan can be described in terms of a long running battle between people and mold. The contemporary period has produced a number of new devices to combat damp, none of which really work in the long run – the mold will always win in the end – but which do provide some protection and relief. Most dried foods, snacks, medicines, and bits of equipment of all sorts come with sachets of silica gel. Two years ago, I started to tip these in an old bread box when we were finished with the goods they came with; I gave up when the bread box showed signs of being overwhelmed. It is handy to have a supply of silica gel in the house; but it won't last for ever: two or three years is probably the best you can expect in this climate. For closets and enclosed spaces, we use little plastic tubs with some sort of desiccant in them: these draw moisture out of the air, which then accumulates in the tub. After a while, one drains off the water and tosses the tub. These can be frightening little things: the tub I put in with my cameras sucked up about two centimetres of water in a couple of weeks, and sent me flapping about for a new camera cabinet. They are quite cheap, and are usually in stock year-round at drugstores, supermarkets, and discount shops. For people with serious damp, or for people who are seriously unhappy with damp, dehumidifiers are available at all the electrical and electronics goods shops. Some air conditioning units also have a dehumidifying function built in. Our house has electric fans. Time, and changes in the weather, are our air conditioning.

Coming as I do from a place where being rained on is usually a fairly passive experience, a monsoonal climate can be a bit of a shock. Our rain is not merely wet: it has a character, moods, bears a grudge, and is never to be trifled with. Sometimes it is comes down like a succession of brimming bathtubs being emptied out over the house; at other times, the rain exists with such subtlety it is impossible to distinguish from the humidity. The climax of our imposing rains comes a few weeks after the end of the rainy season, in August and September, when another change in the overall flow of air gives rise to typhoons. A typhoon is what we call a tropical cyclone in the western Pacific; elsewhere they are called hurricanes, and – in some conditions in Western Australia – willie-willies. The eastern coast of Kyushu suffers more from typhoons than we do in Fukuoka, but it never pays to be complacent about them. Once or twice, nocturnal uncertainty motivated me to close the shutters on our windows when a typhoon wind was blowing – or rather, in anticipation of a typhoon wind: there are stories every year of people being killed by their windows after belatedly heading off to protect them from the wind. Even though we are not on the usual track of the typhoons, we are uncomfortably close to the site of Japan’s most famous – and most deeply appreciated – cyclonic winds: the ‘divine wind’ that wrecked two successive Mongol invasion fleets off the coast in the 1270s.

Early this spring, during the season of Chinese winds, bits of our neighbour’s roof blew off and arced dangerously through the air, landing in diverse places, including our garden and a neighbour's front gate. We often assume that the greatest dangers in a strong wind are the traditional ones: trees, roof tiles, and bits of glass. In our neighbour’s case, the trouble came from corrugated plastic sheeting, screwed into a metal frame. This material, it turns out, is quicker to lose the battle with damp than older kinds of roofing. I could take comfort from that, since most of the roofs on the windward side of our home are in the old style – but there are still a few bits of plastic hanging on next door, and typhoon season is on its way. The wind, like the rain, has an imposing character. We will try to stay on its good side, as much as we can.

2002/06/29

Date posted: 2003-09-01