You look out the window at half nine on a grey Tuesday and half the pavement is walking under umbrellas. This, after ten years of Japanese umbrella etiquette lodging itself in my brain like a splinter, is how I now know for a fucking certainty that it is not raining. Not a drop. Fifty percent umbrella deployment is the national tell. It is the country having a quiet, collective nervous breakdown about the possibility of moisture, and choosing to lose that argument in advance.

Let me be precise about what I am watching. Nobody has consulted the actual sky. The sky is a non-participant. What has happened is that a weather app, run by some shower of berks who get paid the same whether they're right or wrong, has flashed a little cloud icon with a 40% next to it, and forty percent has been interpreted by roughly forty million people as biblical deluge, bring the ark. So out come the umbrellas. Everyone is carrying one. And half of these twats are actually using ‘em.

And here is the bit that actually cooks my head. It is not confidence. It is the opposite of confidence. It is a bloody hedge. Nobody wants to be the mug caught without one, so everyone carries one, so the streets fill with pre-emptive umbrellas, and the pre-emptive umbrellas become the evidence that everyone else clearly knows something you don't, so you go back inside and get yours too. It's a feedback loop of anxiety with handles.

Reading the sky by reading everyone else

This is kuuki wo yomu, reading the air, taken to its purest and most idiotic conclusion. In Japan you do not look at the actual conditions. You look at what everyone else has decided the conditions are and you match it, because being wrong alone is a thousand times worse than being wrong together. The weather is no longer a physical event. It's a consensus. It's a vote. And half the electorate has turned up in wellies to a sunny afternoon because the muppet next to them did.

I have watched people, dry, under a clear sky, with a folded umbrella held horizontally in one hand like a fucking swagger stick, walking with grim purpose as if the clouds are simply late. I have watched a woman deploy a full canopy against what I can only describe as a gentle threat. Ten years in and I now glance at the umbrella count before I trust my own eyes. From the window, if I see every single person with open umbrellas, chances are it’s raining. If it’s only about half, it’s probably invisible moisture in the air and no need for the kasa.

The worst is the clear-plastic biniiru gasa, the disposable convenience-store umbrella, of which this country buys about a hundred and thirty million a year and abandons roughly the same number in the stands outside every building, because the moment the phantom rain fails to arrive nobody can be arsed to keep track of the bloody thing. So you get these graveyards of transparent umbrellas outside every station, a monument to a nation's collective willingness to spend five hundred yen on being wrong about clouds.

The forecast is a suggestion nobody dares refuse

What genuinely gets me, is the confidence of the whole apparatus against the reality of the sky. The immaculate forecasts. The regional radar down to the minute. The little umbrella icons on the train screens. All of this magnificent meteorological theatre, and the actual behavioural output is forty million people carrying rain-sticks around on a dry day like some daft agrarian rain-dance nobody's told them they can stop doing.

And on the day it does piss down properly? Half of them have forgotten it, because yesterday's phantom umbrella is now standing forgotten in a stand three districts away. So the one day it matters, they're the ones sprinting for the konbini. For fuck's sake. The system that carries umbrellas against nothing is precisely the system that gets caught out by something.

So now I have my own rule, forged in contempt. If half the street is carrying umbrellas, it's dry. If nobody is, I probably should run. If everyone is, take the umbrella.