Summer in Japan keeps getting hotter and forces linguistic evolution.
As we get into the back half of spring, it’s time to start getting ready for summer, doing things like taking your linen shirts out of storage, hitting the gym to get your beach body ready, and creating new vocabulary words for when the weather is really, really, really hot.
OK that last one might not be on most of our to-do lists, but it was something the Japan Meteorological Agency, part of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, wanted to get done before the start of summer. The JMA already has specialized vocabulary it uses to describe days when the temperature reaches 25, 30, or 35 degrees Celsius (77, 86, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit): natsubi (“summer days”), manatsubi (“midsummer days”), and moshobi (“fiercely hot days”). However, with summers growing hotter and hotter in Japan, the agency is predicting that the daytime high is going to climb higher than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) often enough over the coming months that it’ll need a word to refer to them too.
Last month, the JMA website conducted a survey, asking respondents to choose from a list of candidates, and based on the results, along with interviews with meteorological experts, the agency has made its decision, and says that henceforth it will refer to over-40-degree days as kokushobi, which translates to “cruel heat days” or “cruelly hot days.”
Kokushobi is written with the kanji 酷, 暑, and 日, meaning “cruel,” “heat/hot,” and “day,” respectively. Incidentally, the koku in kokushobi is the same as the koku in Evangelion opening theme “Zankoku na Tenshi no Teze”/”A Cruel Angel’s Thesis.”
Kokushobi was by far the most common response in the JMA’s survey, garnering 202,954 votes, more than double any other candidate, with second-place finisher chomoshobi (super fierce heat day) receiving only 65,896 votes. Kokushobi also had strong support from meteorology experts for being easy to understand and also because it’s the same term that the Japan Weather Association, a non-government weather forecasting organization, has been using since 2022, so it already has some linguistic traction.
Hopefully this will be the last time the JMA needs to create a new name for extremely hot weather, because we’re not sure if all the breezy pilgrim fashion and ramen shaved ice in Japan could save us from 45-degree-plus heat.
Source: Japan Meteorological Agency (1, 2) via Hachima Kiko
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