Forecasts

Today we're going to have a little bitty culture lesson. (I'm going to get disclaimers out of the way quickly: writing about Japan is a minefield of inaccurate and infantalizing cultural assumptions. If you could get a nickel for every blog post or published book that pushes the idea of either Japan as a land of tradition, dammit or Japan as a land of crazy, then Japanese majors could fund their own college educations entirely on the back of the majority of their field in all its self-loathing essentialism.) Anyway.

Japanese shopping and service culture thrives on creating products you at first find strange, and then realize you can no longer live without. This isn't unique to Japan by any means--mint flavored toothpaste is a prime example of the power of suggestion (advertisement) and how it redefines what we view as practical. Mint toothpaste--artificially created demand, but pretty neat. Silicone fried egg shapers to keep your fried egg heart-shaped and English muffin-sized--artificially created demand, but also pretty neat.

This combined with a widespread (but not society-engulfing) value placed on identifying and maximizing seasonal pleasures has created one of my favorite internet passtimes. Fair readers, behold the tenki.jp (Japan's weather.com) indexes in all their glory.

First, because winter is coming, I give you the nabe index.

This week's stew forecast.

For the uninitiated, nabe is a fall and winter dish that's a lot like a stew, but without the day-long simmering. Add veggies and meat to any of the 20,000 flavors of nabe stock (miso kimchi is my favorite) and fish stuff out as it boils...and there you have it. The pot is cooked with a camper stove at the table, and the whole family just fishes out what they want.  Depending on what goes it, it can be really healthy, and it usually warms up the house a bit too.

This is an index about the best time in the near future to eat nabe, and what kind will be most delicious in your area. Today's potential for nabe-enjoyment is expressed as a four-out-of-five nabe pots, and it recommends a kind of bean paste made near Ibara castle. Tomorrow is only a three-out-of-five, but it says that if you like duck, you should totally go for it. Saturday the 10th looks like awful weather in the meteorological forecast, so it makes sense that the nabe index would be highest then.  I have a feeling that part of this is to keep people's morale up through the winter by suggesting progressively delicious food as the cold and dark set in.

Up next, we have the legitimately useful blanket index.

Oh bother, another four-blanket week.

This is based on the night and early-morning temperatures in each area of Japan. Tonight's note is that if I use a thick blanket, I'll probably be okay. However, I shouldn't be fooled by tomorrow's 40 blanket index--if I skimp out and use a thin blanket, I will be cold in the morning.

I trust this index implicitly because today it told my partner, who has been known to fling comforters across the room in her sleep, not to kick off the covers. 


Now we're really about to step across the threshold into "how did I live without this?".  In case you find yourself without a grandparent with outerwear ESP, tenki.jp has you covered. Pun!

You need all these clothes on your body this week. Sorry.

In this index, a 100 means that it's tank-top weather. The cold category expressed, apparently, by a desire to put on ALL YOUR CLOTHES AT ONCE, has the widest margin.  I have to say it resonates with my experience with winter in Minnesota. When you get down to it, inside the right jacket, 0F and -30F just feel pretty much the same. Today's note--don't allow anyone to go out without a muffler and gloves. Tomorrow's note resembles the blanket index. Don't be fooled, if you leave the house without that coat, you will be cold.

Maybe it seems like too much information, but I really like how it takes meteorological data and in a few infographics, gives you a picture of your week. Temperatures and rain forecasts are nice, but I have a much better idea of how to dress for Friday and Saturday knowing that although it doesn't necessitate any more coats or blankets than Thursday, I will probably want stew those days more than any other day of the week...or at least a need for stew on Friday or Saturday has been successfully implanted in my brain. 

So, what's the moral of the story? What's the cultural lesson here? My take on it is another question. Why face the seasons unprepared for all they have to offer and all the misery they could throw at you? We have the technology and the mental capacity to recognize not only patterns in the area and how they affect our comfort (blanket and coat indexes) but also our desires. Since weather is one of the most primal shared experiences, why not predict the effect of weather on us as well? It's an interesting cultural perspective on the utility of quantitative data in the more subjective aspects of our lives--there are different lines between the "sciency" and the "non-sciency" in different societies.

I guess it all depends on how you view the variable, in this case, weather. Is it a shared experience or a series of data?