SIX fucking seasons!

I have written often about what I call 'cultural blind-spots': which Japan has no less than the Anglosphere.  One of the more tedious is that 'Japan has four seasons'.  It's annoying enough that Japan is supposed to be unique, but four-season climates are as common as dirt in both the northern and antipodean temperate zones.  It's stupid enough as a symptom of Nihonjinron-'logic' meant to set-apart the Japanese.  You ought to read how 'kamo' addresses this:

Branding someone as unusual and different is not the best opening gambit if you’re looking to create a shared mutual space. It’s a clear, if unintended, labeling of you as ‘other’ from the outset. ‘You are not one of us. You never will be.'

The witlessness that sets me off is that it's just fucking untrue.

Winter　　　冬

Spring　　　春

Good Summer　　　五月晴れ

Rainy Season　　　梅雨

Bad Summer　　　地獄

 

Autumn      秋

 
Can't the Japanese count to six?  Yes, and they even have vocabulary for the rainy season and the 'good summer' in May (I coined my own for the 'bad summer', July through September).  Shouldn't they have counted higher than four?  Yes, however, they read too much Chinese Tang Dynasty poetry, and those cats went on about their four seasons: which is fair enough as they were not in the same climate as Japan.  Japan borrow concepts from abroad and apply them without analysis of local conditions?  June weddings make sense in England, where that's the only good month.  In Japan...