Words Related to the Rainy Season & Hamamatsucho Boy fountain 2009.06.01

Hamamatsucho boy fountain dressed in rain gear, ready for the rainy season.

BTW, rain goods started being promoted in department stores last week

Also, I believe rainy season, called tsuyu 梅雨 in Japanese, officially started on this day, June 1st, last year.


Tsuyu can be commonly written two ways. The first, most typical is 梅雨, literally “plum rain,” the rain that comes at the time the plums ripen. The second way to write tsuyu is 黴雨, literally “mold rain,” the rain that brings on the mold. Furthermore, it can also be written 露, the derivation of which means making things rot ("dewy"-->soggy-->rotten). And finally, the rainy season is also, somewhat more poetically, called samidare 五月雨, the rain of the fifth month in the old lunar calendar.

Chinami ni ちなみに (Japanese for BTW), mushi-atsui 蒸し暑し means “steamy hot,” not “buggy-hot” as is often mistaken by non-Japanese speakers.