Extreme heat in Japan
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"Japan announces new name for days over 40C after hottest summer ever", by Ruth Wright, Euronews (4/20/26)
They have words for it. The one that's taking the online media by storm is kokushobi 酷暑日. That literally means "harsh / cruel + hot days". I can attest to this characterization of scorching days in Japan. I remember one summer in Kyoto, which I wouldn't think of as a particularly hot city, when I stood on the sidewalk and was getting ready to cross the street, the pavement of which seemed to be melting under the shimmering heat waves.
The cited article gives other currently popular words for dog days (7/3/25-9/11/26 in America this summer) in Japan.
BUT, here we're talking about 40º C (104º F). Sure, that's hot, uncomfortably hot, but see below my personal account of a month of 106º F days in Austin, Texas. That's surreal heat! And when it comes to the Tarim and Turpan basins in Eastern Central Asia (ECA), you have to go hide in an underground irrigation ditch / canal to escape the torrid temperatures.
Here, in Swarthmore, PA, we had one day of 93º F temp three days ago (mid-April), but now it's erratically down near freezing.
Selected readings
- "Texas German" (4/25/20)
- "University of Texas Linguistics Research Center" (4/24/20) — if you're interested in the history of Indo-European linguistics, this is a classic, must-read account of an NEH workshop. As for extreme heat, feast your eyes on this paragraph describing the EXTREME HEAT I experienced there (Austin TX) in the summer of 1990:
- It was one of the most amazing, intense experiences of my life, not least because the temperature reached over 106º every day for more than a month! It was so hot that the poor campus squirrels would lie prone on their bellies with their legs spreadeagled to absorb whatever relative coolness there may have been in the earth and look up at me pathetically. Just to see what it was like, I ran up the steps of the Longhorns stadium. After about five ups and downs, it seemed as though I were dissolving in sweat.
[h.t. François Lang]
rvc said,
April 22, 2026 @ 8:40 am
iirc kyoto is in a basin, so I actually think in japan it's talked about as one of the hotter cities, even though others are farther south
Victor Mair said,
April 22, 2026 @ 9:32 am
@rvc
Thanks very much for your helpful contribution.
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Yes, Kyoto is located in a basin known as the Yamashiro Basin (or Kyoto Basin). Surrounded by mountains on three sides (east, north, and west) and open to the south, this geography contributes to the city's hot, humid summers and cold, dry winters, as well as its distinctive, historic city layout. (AIO)
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Garrett Wollman said,
April 22, 2026 @ 7:24 pm
Just a comment on character usage here: º which you have used in this article us U+00BA MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR, which is used in Portuguese to indicate the gender of a ordinal number (there is a parallel feminine indicator which looks like an "a" rather than an "o"). The character you want is ° U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN. (There are also "precomposed" versions of "°C" and "°F" which were included in Unicode for compatibility with an obsolete Japanese standard designed for use with square characters, but should not be used today. The same standard includes other unit symbols like ㎜ SQUARE MM which should not be treated as a single grapheme) Relatedly, the space belongs before the degree sign and not after.
Chris Button said,
April 22, 2026 @ 8:17 pm
I was expecting this one to pop up on LLog!
So it seems 猛 (used for extremely hot days) is less intense than 酷?
Anonymous said,
April 23, 2026 @ 4:04 am
40 C/104 F is "sure, that's hot", but 41.1 C/106 F is "surreal hear"? Seems a bit subjective…
Tom said,
April 24, 2026 @ 10:23 pm
I've lived in Kyoto for over 10 years. This is a topic which I stopped talking about years ago because I can't give a satisfactory explanation: despite objective evidence that other places are as hot or as humid, Japan, and especially its famous cities, are extremely uncomfortable in high summer and high (low?) winter. My hometown in the USA reached higher temps, but I was never as uncomfortable there.
Recently, I have started to assimilate to Japanese ways of feeling in hating rainy days. In the USA, I loved rain and never felt inconvenienced. Now, I dread a downpour. Although there are other possible explanations, I think the change is related to absorbing the stresses Japanese people feel–for example, rain means having to lay out wet clothes, shoes, and umbrellas in a small apartment and the inability to do laundry on, perhaps, the one day of the week when you can reliably come home early in the evening; also, having to take different transportation methods to get to work or navigate delays. Etc.
I'm pretty sure that the comparative discomfort of heat and cold in Japan is similarly related to factors which are essentially social and not climatic or physiological in origin.
Tom said,
April 24, 2026 @ 10:31 pm
In contrast, I arrived in Japan in winter as a stress-free tourist. I stayed in an old villa-turned-guesthouse initially, and my face, peaking out from under the futon cover, was exposed to February breezes blowing through gaps in the woodwork. Taking a bath involved walking through unheated halls on hardwood floors. But I never noticed being cold.
Chuck said,
April 25, 2026 @ 7:10 am
Ironic that the first kanji (酷)—kù in Mandarin—is also now used to mean "cool" in the sense of "excellent", so "酷暑日" might also mean "cool hot days".
Yves Rehbein said,
April 27, 2026 @ 12:30 am
I am slightly amused that 酷暑日 contains the alcohol semantophore.
As for dog days, I have wondered about the similar expression cucumber times. Perhaps it is not widely understood but it exists in many languages and in German it is specifically sour, Saure-Gurken-Zeit, that would be pickled. Spicy food is "hot" indeed and I recall that sushi (酸し) using the same "sake radical" derives from す su (酢, 醋, 酸) "vinegar". When this stream of thought had passed, I had to double check because sinoglyphs at the line hight of Latin letters are usually just line noise to me, and 暑日 does not contain 酉, while 酷 does. Its pronunciation in OC /*kʰˤuk/ is far from su, probably unrelated to cucumber or gourd (瓜 OC /*kʷˤra/ [B–S]) etc.*
As for sour, Balto-Slavic cognates confirm "harsh, cruel" (cf. Proto-Slavic *sùrovъ and Old Lithuanian suristė). Ferment may also be related to ferveō ("to boil, be hot").
*: Tamil kāy "unripe fruit; vegetable" (cf. orange << nāraṅga / nāraṅkāy) also means "to grow hot, be heated".