This week: New words about the weather. In Japanese! Let’s talk about them. Also, there’s a great name for a smoothie shop buried in the footnotes.
Hotting Up
Over the last couple of issues, we've talked a bit about how English sometimes borrows words and sometimes just makes them up out of whole cloth. But, this week, I thought we'd leave English aside for a minute and talk about some neologisms from another language, one which I just happen to use everyday, mainly to bitch about the weather.
Japan has had a weird summer, weather-wise. It's been much hotter than usual but with less rain and fewer storms. Only when there have been storms, they've been the tear-down-the-walls level displays of wind1 and lightning. It also means that the weather has been an even more common topic of conversation than usual; it means that the news has bumped coverage of the weather from five minutes at the end of the broadcast to almost the entirety of the show.
In fact, the weather has been so weird, the Japan Weather Association has been breaking out all kinds of weird vocabulary2 to go along with it.
Earlier this year they debuted two new words, one for a day time temperature of over 40°C and one for a nighttime temperature of over 30°C. They are kokushobi and chounettaiya respectively and they're kind of fun3. Kokushobi translates literally as "severe heat day," but I really like that fact that it could also be translated as "unfair heat day," which honestly seems a bit more appropriate. Chounettaiya, on the other hand, translates as "super sweltering night," but, again, there's an alternate translation that seems both more inappropriate and yet more honest: “super sultry night.”
Both of these words, obviously, address the fact that temperatures in Japan rarely go over 40°C. Until recently, anyway. During the summer of 2011, a few months after the earthquake and tsunami that so thoroughly devastated parts of Japan, the government had not been able to return the power grid to its normal levels. As such, they asked schools, offices, and other businesses to refrain from using the air conditioning as much as possible.
At the elementary school I worked at, we made due by running battery-powered fans covered with wet cloths and positioned behind bottles of ice. They were better than nothing, but only just. At any rate, the insanely high, I-think-I'm-going-to-die temperatures during that summer rarely went over 35°C. And now we've got new words for when the temperature goes over 40°C. Not the kind of change you really want to see in the world.
But the other word I want to talk about today is a little more fun. Recently, in addition to the heat, Japan has been having sudden, strong downpours that can dump as much as 80ml of rain inside of an hour4. Fortunately, back in the late sixties, as the news covered the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, some clever wag came up with a new piece of slang that is a little bit borrowed, a little bit neologistic: gerilagou.
The "gerila" portion of the word comes from English5 word guerrilla. The idea is that the rain storm is a sudden and surprise attack out of nowhere like, well, a guerrilla army's attack would be. As I said, the word was coined in the 60s6 and then kind of disappeared for a while. But, like all good words, gerilagyo popped back up in the early 2000s, even becoming one of the year's top buzzwords in 2008. Since then, as the frequency of the rainstorms has increased7 so has usage of the word8.
In fact, "gerila" by itself seems to be well on its way to becoming a kind of prefix for any sort of sudden, unplanned event as words like gerilaraibu (an unplanned, impromptu live concert) have begun making their way into the zeitgeist9.
I suspect that as the climate crisis worsens, we'll be seeing a lot of new words with which to discuss it in English, Japanese, and every other language out there. The best we can do is make sure we’re having as much fun with the language as possible if only to keep a light on in the dark.
91 Days
We have reached the halfway point. The first six issues are up at the site or you can always follow me on Instagram or Flickr. Links at the 91 Days website.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Since we’ve been talking about Japanese words, I’m going to keep the rabbit hole on theme and link just three of my favorite Japanese songs on YouTube. (If you ever want more recommendations, just ask. I’ve got lots.) Here we go:
Never Young Beach - Owakare No Uta - NYB is a great, young band that has kind of a surf rock sound that wouldn’t have been out of place in 90s California. The video for this is a bit long, but it’s heartfelt and easy to watch (the song actually starts at 3:40).
The Blue Hearts - Yume - TBH are the O.G.s of Japanese pop-punk, melodic and lyrical, but pure rock ‘n’ roll, Yume, which means dream in Japanese was first released in the late 80s but it holds up easily.
Humbert Humbert - Tora - HH are another old-school band; they started as a folk band before going in a more pop-ish direction. This song is a ballad that is striking in its simplicity.
From the Archives
Let’s stay on theme for the archives today and go all the way back to the first time I featured a Japanese word as the topic of the week. Here’s a link to Learned Volume One, Issue Eighteen, Shichi-Go-San:
Usually summer sees a number of typhoons hit the islands, which are terrifyingly strong storms, but they consist mainly of wind and rain, not thunder and lightning.
Source for this is Sora News 24, which sourced it from Tenki.jp.
The words, not the actual weather, which is just...blech.
I have not verified this fact; it comes from my seven-and-a-half-year-old daughter who swears its true according to one of her science books. So, uh, consider this your warning to take a large salt tablet before repeating it.
Or, technically, Spanish.
I should note that it is not in official use by NHK or the Japan Weather Association because of concerns that its association with guerrilla warfare is inappropriate.
Sometimes, I teach kids. And elementary school kids are hard-wired to be little pun machines. So, during a class earlier this summer, one kid asked how to say gerilagou in English. I told him he could just say "heavy rain" but then I thought it would more fun to teach him the difference between guerrilla and gorilla and how they're pronounced the same in English. That led to a full-on pun session with the two of us deciding that Guerrilla Banana would be the perfect name for a pop-up smoothie shop.
I didn’t know this until researching this article, but you can use the same formulation for an unexpected, heavy snow: gerilayuki.
Ever since I have read Kafka on the shore, I refer to heavy rains as : It's raining fishes here.
And a new addition now is Guerilla Rain.