It is the twenty-eighth of May and I am watching a grown man slowly poach inside a polyester suit because a committee in 1974 decided that summer begins in June. The office air conditioning is right there. Bolted to the wall. A magnificent piece of Japanese climate technology, the sort of kit this country sells to the entire planet, sat silent and dark because the official cooling period has not yet begun. It is 34 degrees in the room. The thermostat is a decoration. The calendar is in charge. Welcome to the deranged seasonal logic of the Japanese office, where the air conditioner is a thing you are legally forbidden from using until the almanac grants permission.

Let me be very clear about what is happening here, because it is genuinely fucking insane and everyone has agreed to pretend it isn't. The temperature in the room is irrelevant. The measured, physical, sweat-running-down-the-spine temperature does not enter into it. What matters is the date. There is a date on which cooling is permitted to begin, and that date was not arrived at by science, or comfort, or the radical notion of glancing at a window. It was decided. Once. By a committee of absolute clowns who have all since died, and whose decree now governs the body temperature of millions of living people who never voted for it.

This is koromogae, the seasonal clothing change, scaled up into building policy and weaponised. There is a day on which the nation switches from winter uniform to summer uniform, and a day on which it switches back, and these days are fixed, and the weather is simply expected to comply. It does not comply. It is 34 bloody degrees in May with the regularity of a Swiss train, and every single year the entire salaryman class sits there gently steaming, because the date says spring and the date does not negotiate.

Why the calendar beats the thermostat every time

Here is the bit that turns my contempt up to a rolling boil. This is the country that gave the world the inverter aircon, the heated bidet that knows who you are, the vending machine that can sense the ambient temperature and adjust its own product. World-leading climate tech, deployed in a toilet seat, withheld from a room full of dying men because some tosser in middle management is terrified of being the one who flipped the switch a week early. Nobody will authorise it. Nobody. The decision sits in a committee like a corpse nobody wants to be caught moving.

And you cannot simply turn it on yourself, because the switch is locked, or it's behind a panel, or it requires a key held by a facilities manager who is himself sweating through his shirt but will defend the June date with his last conscious breath. To ask is to read the kuuki wrong. To complain is to admit you cannot endure what everyone else is enduring in silence, and the silent endurance is the entire fucking point. The suffering isn't a bug. The suffering is the ritual. You are meant to sit there and bake, quietly, as proof of your commitment to the system that is baking you.

So the salaryman dies a little. Face shining. Collar soaked. Eight-thousand-yen tie strangling a man who is, by any honest thermometer, in a sauna. He fans himself with a meeting agenda about Q2 synergy. He does not say a word. He has decided, along with everyone else in the building, that the calendar outranks his own central nervous system, and one cannot help but feel this is the work of a sovereign nation's finest minds.

The forecast says 35. The committee says spring.

The genuinely insulting part is the smugness of it. The aesthetic of order. The laminated notice on the wall announcing the cooling period commencement date as though it were a triumph of planning rather than a documented hostage situation in a beige room. For fuck's sake. There is no planning here. There is only a date, picked before half the staff were born, defended by people who have never once asked whether a room full of overheating humans might know more about the temperature than a piece of paper from 1974.

I have given up. I bring a battery fan. I am the muppet sat in the corner with a tiny plastic propeller while the wankers around me sweat with dignity. It is June in four days. The switch will be flipped. It will, of course, be raining and seventeen degrees.