梅雨　Japan's Fifth Season - The Rainy Season

By Freddy Benstein | Wednesday, Jun 4, 2008

I’ve been dreading this for nearly a month now.  Ever since the weather started to get nicer and the days a bit longer at the beginning of May, there was this sense that something unpleasant was lurking just around the corner. 

With two consecutive days of steady rain last week, I realized that the unpleasantness was nearly upon us.  Within the next week or so, we will be right in the middle of the rainy season.  Rainy season is particularly severe in the Hokuriku Region, where we live, where they say that you are better off forgetting your lunch, than forgetting your umbrella. 

I can expect at least a month of nearly daily rain showers, cloudy weather, humidity, mold growing in the corners of my home and stubborn laundry that takes several days to dry without a dryer.  Furthermore it is difficult to play outside when it is constantly raining and muddy, so our two small children will also likely drive us crazy as they become frustrated with being trapped inside all the time. 

In spite of all these inconveniences, for some reason, a part of me is nostalgic about Japan’s rainy season.  I kind of feel like I do in the autumn, one of my favorite times of year. I love the leaves, the food, (American) football games the cooler weather and so on, but the arrival of fall also signals the beginning of the school year, after a nice long summer vacation.  I can’t think of any time when I actually looked forward to school starting. 

Still, Japan’s fifth season carries some happy nostalgia for me.  My first visit to Japan was in 1995.  I arrived at the beginning of June.  As the plane made its descent into Narita, we passed through a blanket of clouds and touched down in a very wet, gray, humid and hot Japan.  My ride picked me up at the airport and drove me several hours to the west of Tokyo.  I would be working for two months at a summer camp along the Okutama river in the mountains near Ome (青梅).  I seriously don’t recall seeing the sun for a month.  It rained nearly every day, and if it wasn’t raining, there were thick clouds.  It didn’t help that the camp was in the middle of doing drainage work, so many areas were dug up, creating a prodigious amount of mud. 

In spite of the less-than-ideal weather, the location was incredibly beautiful.  It didn’t matter how many days I was there, my breath was taken away by the view every morning.  Besides, this was my first trip to Japan, a place I had strongly desired to visit for several years and everything was exciting and new to me.  I truly enjoyed my time there, even with the constant rain.

I don’t like the rainy season mainly because of the inconveniences it creates.  At the same time, it brings a range of sensory stimulations, smells, sights, sounds, feelings, that spark memories of that first trip to Japan, in the mountains just outside of Tokyo.  I enjoyed my summer in Japan, and eventually the clouds went away (of course then it got unbearably hot!) and if it hadn’t been for those two months at the camp, I might never have ended up where I am today.  I still dread all the inconveniences that come with the rainy season, but just as there is a haiku, which states, “there is joy, too, in loneliness”, I think there is joy, too, in the rainy season.

Freddy Benstein's Profile

I am a language teacher working at a private Junior High/High School and College in Western Japan. Since I earned my undergraduate degree in 1997, I have spent nearly half of my time living, working and studying in foreign countries, in Asia and Europe. Since 1995 I have visited Japan nearly every year and spent two years living here from 1998 - 2000. I am now working again in Japan for an unspecified length of time.

Interests: Japanese, taiko, music, photography, German Romanticism, 19th century history/literature

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