Raindrops

I think I finally understand what the term "rainy season" means. Being British, it has always seemed a bit like a joke: you know, the kind of paltry we have four of them in England, and they last three months each joke that middle aged women tell each other in British offices over their multi-packs of pastries from Sainsburys. But this isn't a joke, this rainy season: move to a sub-tropical climate, and suddenly rainy season means something. It means: it's really, really, really rainy. And everything else comes second.

We're on week three of Rainy Season, now. I thought it started a bit before that - a couple of days of rain, spattered here and there - but no: that was just rain. There's a distinct difference, apparently, because in Japan the weather is as well behaved and regimented as everything else. "Oh no," my Japanese colleagues told me, shaking their heads. "Rainy season starts next week. On Tuesday. At about lunchtime." (They've got the same attitude regarding typhoons too: whenever I get a bit excited over a bit of strong wind, they tell me firmly "not until the second half of July." Until then, it's just wind.)

This rain is not British rain, though: that much is clear. British rain is cold and sharp and undecided; it rains, it stops, it rains a bit harder, it stops. Whatever rain has been allocated is spread out throughout the year, throughout every day: a bit here, a bit there, sprinkled like sugar from a dieter's spoon. Everything gets cleaner and fresher and crispier and - occasionally - a little bit brittle looking, and when the rain stops everything looks a slightly different colour: slightly darker and realer. The air tastes like it's just been put through a washing machine - which, in a sense, it has - and "it's raining" can mean: "it's raining a little bit," or "it's raining a lot," or "it's drizzling slightly," or "it looks like it might be raining but I can't be sure" or "who stole my bloody umbrella? I actually need it this lunchtime." Just like the eskimos have hundreds of words for our word snow, so we have the opposite: a million different meanings for the word rain.

Not so Southern Japanese rain. "It's raining" means: "it's raining." It's well behaved rain: it all comes down at once, and when it's not rainy season anymore, it stops. It's not even the same kind of rain. It's fat, and warm, and ploppy, and insistent. It's confident rain: neither sad, nor angry, nor insipid. Just loud and dogmatic and unavoidably there. And it doesn't stop. Not ever. It rains in different strengths - ranging from hard to really hard to Jesus Christ that's going to put a hole in my car roof - but it doesn't stop. It just keeps going: into rivers down the streets, filling up the bin outside, bouncing off the laundry I can't be bothered to go out and collect (it's wet: it can't get any wetter). And the air doesn't get cleaner at all. It just gets soggy and muggy and a little bit smelly, because the moisture makes bad things and good things grow at the same speed. And I spend half of my time staring out of the window, fascinated by this confident, grown up, noisy rain, and the other half swearing because everything I own is damp and smells like under a bed.

It will stop in about seven days, I've been told. Seven, eight or nine days: possibly ten, if we're really unlucky. Then the sun will come out, it will be unbearably hot, and we'll all wish we had run naked in the rain for nine hours every day just to cool down in advance.

Of course, I'm British: I know everything there is to know about rain, so it's the sun I'm looking forward to finding out about. The kind of sun that comes out, and stays out, and does what it's supposed to do: shine, unrelentlessly. A grown up, confident kind of sun, unlike the undecided, teenager sun I grew up knowing.

And if the summer here is anything like I've been told it is, I'll take as much rain as Nichinan has to offer right now: and I'll do it with a smile on my face, regardless of how wet my clothes are. Because when the summer gets here, it's a real summer, just like this is real rain. And that is a change I'm looking forward to getting used to.