Why I Hate the Season Everyone Loves

(日本語版あり)

This is Part I of a four-part series in English on my pontification on the four seasons.

Of the four seasons, I hate spring the most. I try to live by the words, “Never hate, sometimes dislike,” so I have reserved a very special place in my heart for the season we are currently in.

There are many reasons to hate spring, but topping the list is the fact that it is a dooming reminder of the apocalyptic summer to come. Spring is when day-by-day, week-by-week, the conditions outside becomes gradually hotter and more humid, until it culminates in the arrival of the season of the unbearable. I suppose my hatred towards spring is somewhat unfair because spring is really just a collateral damage to my sheer disdain for the summer, but spring just needs to accept that life–and I–are unfair; it’s going to get blamed more for being close to something evil than being the evil itself.

Spring can’t just blame the summer for being the target of my wrath. It can also blame the winter.

As spring takes over the calendar in March, the outside generally goes from cold to warm, then to hot.  In a transitional month like the spring, though, temperatures don’t change gradually.  Instead, they fluctuate wildly between the days.  And when the general trend breaks, I find myself wearing a fleece in middle of winter conditions because I dressed lightly relying on the temperature from the day before. Autumn in that sense is a far preferable transitional month. When there’s a break from the general trend, I can enjoy the unexpectedly mild weather by taking off the jacket that I had with me.

The spring has the misfortune of having bad neighbors, but it’s not helped by the legion of fans who profess their love for it.  It is said often that misery loves company, but company also makes misery more tolerable.  What I have discovered about spring, though, is that I am apparently in a very distinct minority of people who hate it.  Alas, I am without company among the crowd of smiling faces that I see as I stroll through the streets on a breezy spring day, left alone to hate this season in isolation.

It’s somewhat mystifying why more people don’t hate the spring.  So many people seem miserable in suffering from the hellish hay fever that plagues half the population every year around this time of the year. When I lived in the suburbs of New Jersey, I could see goldenrod floating in the air, waiting to be inhaled by a body that is violently going to reject it (this observation, though, is apparently somewhat of a misconception), which was always a reminder that I needed to walk around with Kleenex.

In Japan, it’s even worse.  Thanks to an ill-advised government campaign after World War II to encourage the rebuilding of the country using the Japanese cedar, the entire country is built using lumber that’s essentially spouting allergen.  I thankfully haven’t had to experience the red noses and the teary eyes of quarter of the people in Tokyo, although I’ve been told my time will come not in the distant future. When that day arrives, spring will cement its position as the most detestable of the seasons.

Perhaps the Japanese are particularly fond of the spring because this is the famous cherry blossom season.  If you’ve never seen cherry blossoms before, you’d definitely want to make a trip down to Washington, D.C., where the cherry blossoms that the Japanese donated decades ago still add beautiful colors to the city in the spring.

The Japanese have a traditional way of enjoying this beauty, called ohanami, which involves lots of alcohol with casual good food in great company under the blooming flowers.  Since I’m all about getting drunk on sake and eating anywhere, anytime, this Japanese version of a picnic is something I always wanted to experience while I was in the States.

What I learned is that, like many things in life, ohanami is something that sounds much nicer in concept than in the execution.  The problem is essentially that the cherry blossoms  (a) have no sense of when it’s become “warm” and  (b) are too weak to weather any wind or rain.  The result is that there is a mad rush to enjoy the cherry blossoms in full bloom during a very narrow window–usually one, at most two, weekends–usually in frigid March weather.  After my freezing experience this year, I’m guessing that the ohanami experience will go down much better in Russian-style, with lots of vodka to numb the pain.

As much as I enjoyed the food and the drinks and the people, ohanami did confirm one thing that I had always merely suspected: much like ohanami, which symbolizes spring in Japan, most of the people actually only enjoy the idea of the spring, rather than the season itself.

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