It is 6am and the telly is screaming at me about a typhoon in Japan that is, and I quote the graphics directly, going to make landfall on the Kanto region with the force of a biblical reckoning. There is a man in a hard hat. There is a map of the archipelago drenched in angry red swirls. There is a woman with a voice like a hostage negotiator telling me to secure my belongings and avoid going outside. And outside my window, at this exact moment, there is precisely nothing. Not a leaf moving. A pigeon is having a relaxed sit-down on the aircon unit.

This is the third one this season. Same routine every single fucking time.

For four days they build it up. Super Typhoon Number Whatever, churning up from the Philippines, and the national broadcaster wheels out the full apparatus of dread. Hourly tracking maps. A laminated colour-coded danger scale. Some poor sod in a fisherman's jacket stood on a seawall in Okinawa getting genuinely battered so the rest of us can feel the gravity of it. The supermarkets sell out of bread and bottled water like we're prepping for a siege. People board up windows in Setagaya. Setagaya. Where the most dangerous natural event in living memory was a slightly aggressive cherry blossom.

Why Tokyo typhoon warnings never match the actual weather

And then the bloody thing arrives. The big one. The named one. The one they've been advertising like the return of a Roman emperor. And in Tokyo it lands as... drizzle. Mild, apologetic, faintly disappointing drizzle. The sort of weather that in Manchester wouldn't even qualify as weather. You'd walk to Tesco in it without a coat and call it a nice afternoon. Here, an entire metropolis of thirty-seven million people has been instructed to brace for the apocalypse, and what we get is the meteorological equivalent of a slightly damp handshake.

Don't misunderstand me. I know typhoons are real. I know they kill people in Kyushu and flatten things in Shikoku and that the seawall man is not having a laugh. The contempt isn't for the storm. The contempt is for the theatre. For the absolute clowns in the production gallery who have decided that the correct response to a low-pressure system three hundred miles away is to put Tokyo into a state of pre-emptive national mourning, every fucking time, regardless of what actually happens here.

Because here is the thing nobody says out loud. The build-up is the event. The anticipation is the typhoon. The performance of collective preparedness, the kuuki of shared dread, the office-wide email about working from home, the trains pre-emptively suspending service at 3pm under a clear sky. That's the bit they actually enjoy. The weather is almost incidental. We have constructed a magnificent civic ritual of bracing for impact, and we will perform it in full whether or not anything hits.

The salaryman who got sent home early for nothing

My favourite part is the aftermath. The morning after the great non-event, everyone files back into the office, faintly sheepish, faintly relieved, and absolutely nobody says the obvious thing, which is: that was nothing. That was drizzle with a press office. We were sent home early to barricade ourselves against a stiff breeze and a damp Tuesday. The salaryman who cancelled his evening, who bought the panic-bread, who got the kids' school shut for the day, will not breathe a word of complaint. Because complaining would mean admitting the ritual was bollocks, and you cannot admit the ritual was bollocks. The ritual is sacred. The ritual must be fed.

So we'll do it all again next week. Super Typhoon Number Whatever-Plus-One is already forming somewhere warm, and somewhere in a broadcast centre a man is laminating a new danger scale and clearing his throat for the hard-hat segment. The maps will go red. The bread will vanish. Setagaya will board up against the coming cherry blossom.

And I'll stand at my window with a brew, watching that smug fucking pigeon, waiting for the drizzle. For fuck's sake.