Weather

As I said in my last post, things got pretty chilly when the winter arrived. I suppose that is rather to be expected, so I didn’t dwell on it too long, but I do fear that I haven’t well represented the odd climate of Japan to you all. Now no country can help the hemisphere it’s in, nor how far from the equator it rests, but even as they labour under the yoke of regional megaclimates some individual landmasses retain enough influence to produce startling idiosyncrasies. Japan is one such.

This whole string of islands follows the same pattern – endless mountains surrounded by thin strips of land against the sea, with the occasional exposed plateau. Nobody bothers trying very hard to develop anything in the mountains, but the rest of the land is so cramped that they have to wallmount their livestock.

Moisture blows in off of the ocean from every direction, and gets driven up the side of the mountains until it cools enough to form gigantic clouds. Then it mills about, trapped between the peaks, until it finds a gap to trickle out and slides down into the cities. When I got up this morning to go to class, the campus looked like this:

But the days are warming up, and at these lower climes the cuts through it pretty fast. When I left my class an hour and a half later, I took this photograph:

 

And by the time I’d walked to the end of the path and looked behind me, those last few wisps were rolling away:

You could see the cloud rising up from the whole campus over the space of about half an hour:

This happens every two days or so. I’m not sure how far the clouds drop, because I’m never down into the city early enough to find out, but I understand from my Japanese friends that it’s the same all over the country. Until June, of course, when commences fourty days of searing heat and hope-destroying typhoon.

~ by gl0g on May 1, 2007.