It is the second week of October and a man in a fleece has just informed me, with the solemn reverence of a priest delivering last rites, that Japan has four seasons. Not as a fact. As a revelation. As if he were unveiling the structure of the atom. And here it is again, the Japan four seasons obsession, the single most baffling source of national pride in a country that has, frankly, earned plenty of legitimate ones and chosen instead to die on the hill of "we have spring, summer, autumn and winter, the way no other land on God's earth does."

Let me be absolutely clear about what is happening here. The claim is not "Japan has lovely seasons." It does. The claim is the implied, smug, recurring, soul-grinding suggestion that four seasons is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, a sacred quartet bestowed upon these islands and these islands alone, while the rest of us shivering foreign clods make do with some vague undifferentiated meteorological porridge. I have had this said to me by taxi drivers, by colleagues, by a bloke at a nomikai, and once, I swear to you, by a tourism poster. A poster. Telling me, a man from a country with such aggressively four seasons that we invented complaining about all of them, that Japan has four fucking seasons.

For fuck's sake. Britain has four seasons. We just get them in the same afternoon.

Why the four seasons myth refuses to die

Here is the bit that actually makes me want to eat a thorn from a rose bush. It isn't even true on its own terms. Japan does not have four neatly delineated seasons. It has roughly eleven months of either trying to boil you alive or trying to kill you with damp, padded with about nine days of cherry blossom that everyone photographs like it's the Second Coming, and a fortnight of red leaves that triggers a nationwide stampede to Kyoto. The summer is a wet, screaming, cicada-infested hellscape where you sweat through a shirt walking to the konbini. The "rainy season" is, last I checked, a fifth bloody season that nobody includes in the marketing because tsuyu doesn't fit on the poster. So it's not even four. It's five, and one of them is mould.

And yet the myth grinds on, polished and re-deployed by absolute clowns at every level of society. Schoolchildren are taught it. Adverts deploy it. There is an entire genre of TV programming dedicated to standing in a field and being amazed that leaves change colour, an event that has been happening reliably across the entire temperate zone of the planet since before there was a Japan to be smug about it.

The tossers who keep the myth alive aren't being malicious. That's almost worse. They genuinely, sincerely believe that the procession of seasons is a special national characteristic, like the language or the cuisine, rather than a basic consequence of sitting on a tilted planet at a temperate latitude. You cannot argue with it because it isn't an argument. It's a vibe. It's tatemae about the weather.

The part where I lose it entirely

WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENS IN GERMANY. What do you think is going on in Canada, in Korea, in literally the next country over, geographically and climatically near-identical, also with four seasons, also with red leaves, also with snow. Do you think the trees in France hold a meeting and decide to stay green out of respect? Do you imagine New England, an entire region whose tourism economy is built on autumn leaves, has somehow misplaced one of its seasons down the back of the sofa?

I have lived here long enough to file the forms, learn the bows, and read the kuuki in a room full of silent salarymen. I have made my peace with the fax machine. I have surrendered to the hanko. But the day a grown adult tells me, eyes shining, that Japan uniquely possesses the concept of winter, something in me detaches and floats up near the ceiling and watches the rest of me nod politely while screaming internally.

It's coming up to summer now, apparently. You can tell, because everyone's about to remind me.