The Weather Is Going to Get Cold Soon...

September 5, 2025

A man on a bench tells me, “The weather is going to get cold soon,” and all of a sudden, I am back in time, in three or four places at once, and nowhere at all…

When I was fifteen, you could say that my entire world shifted about 8000km to the West, toward a land that we call the East. Japan and South Korea became the centres around which my life revolved. South Korea because of professional Starcraft and K-pop girl groups, and Japan because of, well, everything else.

As a thirty year-old man who now knows Japanese and has been to Japan multiple times, its hard to fully grasp what Japan meant to me back then. Truthfully, I didn’t know anything about it. Every day, Japan, and the Japanese language, unfolded before me as an endless mystery.

My reference points for Japan back then were quite different to what I might think of now. Later, I would find another man’s Japan, and attempt to make it my own — but for now, I was forging my own path. I latched onto anything I could, following paths from video games to anime to music and back again.

Gradually, anime came to dominate more and more of my image of Japan. I was never a binge watcher; instead, I would luxuriate in a show over weeks and months, endlessly re-watching the opening and ending credits, struggling to parse the lyrics of the songs. Each show served as the backdrop for my life, to the point where even to this day, I can reliably date events using the anime I was watching at the time, like an ancient Imperial calendar. The Science 11 exam I attended while hungover after a family bonfire — this was in the third week of the Steins;Gate era, as I remember well watching the opening over and over as the room spun around me… Months earlier, when I tried to drive myself to a refereeing course in a different city and got hopelessly lost (because I didn’t have a smartphone, let alone GPS), this was during the days of Hanasaku Iroha — the second season, to be precise, because I remember watching that opening to pump myself up before I left…

Late at night when memories are their strongest, when nigh-forgotten relics of my past arise before me in all their looming glory: this is when I encountered that man on his bench. He was just outside of Iwatodai Station, luxuriating in the November air. I passed him on the way to visit the old couple who runs the bookstore, and he told me the weather was going to get cold soon. And all of a sudden, I was transported into the midst of the second anime I ever watched, whose name I had forgotten how to spell. Nothing about the characters or the plot surfaced at all; I just remembered that, in the show, it was cold…

I was already in the past at this point. I was playing Persona 3, a video game I had first played right in the middle of my anime phase. I played it together with a friend, and I think it took us around 18 months to beat it. By the time we reached the end of its 70-hour story, I had almost completely lost track of what was going on. My friend’s mom would usually arrive to pick him up right in the middle of important plot events, and she’d get furious if we made her wait, so all the most emotionally impactful scenes had been undercut by a sort of frantic panic about infuriating this friend’s mom.

But I still loved the game — maybe even moreso when I wasn’t actively playing it. Since we couldn’t get together that much, I spent the meantime listening to the soundtrack obsessively. Playing the game again now, it’s sometimes surprising to hear a particular song start to play, which I associate more with my walks to and from school than with playing a video game.

And so it seems I was in the perfect mood to be transported, and it was to the snowy world of Kanon that I was sent…

Kanon is an anime produced by Kyoto Animation, based on a visual novel by the developer, Key. I watched Kanon because Clannad, the first anime I ever watched, was developed and adapted by the same studios.

In Kanon, a guy named Aizawa Yuuichi travels to a city, presumably somewhere up north, to stay with an aunt and cousin that he hasn’t seen for seven years. I know this now because I immediately went and watched the first episode after meeting the man on the bench. Before doing so, I probably would not have been able to recall this premise. All I would have been able to say is, “In Kanon, a male anime protagonist reminiscent of all other mid-2000s male anime protagonists forms platonic-yet-exceedingly-close relationships with a number of strange girls, in a city where it is cold, and there is always snow on the ground…”

Who those girls are, what they look like, and what sort of misadventures befall them and our snarky-yet-caring protagonist, I would not have been able to tell you — and still can’t. However, I did read a section of the Wikipedia article while trying to figure out where the city was supposed to be (nowhere, as it turns out), and learned that three separate characters in the show suffer from some form of amnesia or another, which sounds about right. We learn in that first episode that the main character has a past: events took place in this mysterious city seven years ago that were drastically important, and yet somehow lost to time…

The whole show, as it turns out, is on Youtube. It was uploaded by someone named Amanda. This is how things were back then; random people would upload full seasons of an anime to Youtube and no one would bat an eye. Often, each episode would be split into two parts, due to video length restrictions. Amanda must have uploaded Kanon after that particular restriction was removed, for each episode is a single part. It’s also in HD, which is pretty nifty.

Opening up a Youtube video and seeing the words “13 years ago” next to the viewcount is still a relatively shocking experience. I guess we have reached the point where “20 years ago” is theoretically possible, although I’ve yet to see it. The large majority of videos that old probably contain copyrighted material, or may as well be impossible to find.

The comments below the video are mostly about Clannad. It seems that most people discovered Kanon via Clannad, the same way I did. Kanon was actually released first, which fact leads to the indignation of certain commenters who insist that Kanon is not, in fact, “like Clannad” — instead, Clannad is like Kanon. These people are the quintessential internet commenters: technically correct, and yet annoying all the same.

Those not talking about Clannad instead talk about another anime called Angel Beats. These three shows, all released within a similar time frame, form a trifecta of “tearjerking anime.” Melodramatic to the max, with late flashback-heavy reveals and swelling music, these shows aim to create a strong emotional attachment between viewer and character, in order to most effectively tug at your heartstrings during their final moments.

This fact was what warmed me to Clannad so much in the first place. I was a fifteen year-old boy, and I didn’t cry about anything. I had strong emotions, but I rarely actually felt them; instead, they just made me act weird. Clannad made me cry, and it felt so great that I went looking for my next fix. Anime, I realized, was a medium for emotional catharsis, and I needed more.

Japan was in these tears. But more than that, Japan was in this world that I was building for myself: these anime and games that no one around me had heard of or could understand. I learned how to write Japanese by transcribing the lyrics to songs from Persona 3, and practised reading by following the karaoke subtitles to anime openings and endings. Learning Japanese gave me access to a secret world; as soon as I learned my first two words — “dog” and “cat” — I had already travelled deeper into Asia than any of my family line before me.

To my mind, everything from Japan was cool, and everything not from Japan was less cool. I didn’t think it was weird to watch anime; I thought everyone else was weird for not watching it. I was convinced that if they only knew, they would agree that anime was the coolest and most profound artistic medium on our planet. They would agree that the social structure and history of Japan, which I only knew about indirectly and in bits and pieces, was far superior to that of our Western World.

At the same time, I was glad they didn’t know. Japan was mine. I blasted “Heavenly Star” by the Genki Rockets (with the support of my one other anime-adjacent friend), much to the chagrin of my video-game-but-not-anime-nerd friends. (That Youtube video, I’ll have you know, is 18 years old.) The otaku world I had entered was a community held together by the knowledge that The World would never understand, and that we didn’t want them to.

Anime was an entirely new world, an entirely new visual and narrative medium, operating within an unknown tradition and transmitted via an alien language. And it was built just for me. It is no secret that the male teenager is the ideal target for anime. Cute girls, gruesome action, goofy jokes, melodrama, and the wild tonal shifts inherent to containing all these elements — all tied together within 24-minute blasts of entertainment. Surrogate friends, unreal adventures, and relatable moments of high-school tedium. It all just made sense to me, pulling me ever and ever deeper.

The end of my anime obsession coincides exactly with when I got my first girlfriend. This is partially coincidence, and partially the nature of the whole thing. Anime was a means of escape: a deliberate decision to not fit into the real world of my high school. My first girlfriend, however, liked anime too. Suddenly, anime was real. By becoming real, it lost a good deal of its charm.

I didn’t get into anime again for several years. When I returned, it was 2017 — perhaps the worst year of my life. Once again, I was lonely, depressed, stressed, anxious, and had no future. It only made sense to slip back beneath the comfortable duvet that is anime, and sleep my dreamless sleep.

I’m thinking about anime a lot recently. I can feel myself drifting from the world. It’s not as painful as in the past — it’s not a retreat this time, just a temporary drift. I’m at home by myself a lot, and I don’t need to wake up early anymore. I end up in my study late at night, which feels eerily similar to my old bedrooms. At night, there’s no expectations, and nothing to do. So I play video games. And video games, inevitably, lead me to anime.

It’ll be winter again soon enough. In the first episode of Kanon, the main character helps his aunt shovel snow. Back in the day, this would’ve felt exotic, although now it’s all too familiar. For five months of the year, my city too will be covered in snow.

Japan is also all too familiar. I’ve seen it from many sides, explored it from many angles. I’ve been in underground bars, middle-class living rooms, capsule hotels, and mountaintop hot springs; on country trains and city subways, atop the Tokyo Tower and in large fields in the middle of nowhere in particular. We were watching the film High & Low the other night, and my wife turned to me as Enoshima Island appeared on screen and said, “We’ve been there,” and I said, “I know.”

The world used to be large and impossible. This is because I didn’t know anything and had no agency. I could only truly see the world late at night, in the dark, through my computer screen. I heard about places like Japan and I never stopped to consider whether they were real or not.

Curiosity is a curious thing. Driven by this constant agony of not-knowing toward a mythical state of “knowing,” you repeatedly try to “satisfy” your curiosity, but always end up with the exact opposite sensation: you’re not satisfied; you’re merely full. What seemed magic is no longer so, and so you must search wider and further and deeper. The more you see, the more you’ve seen; categories start to form, and new objects only resemble the old. Everyone you meet reminds you a little bit of someone you’ve met before. You realize that each book is made up of the same words, and although it’s such a stupid and trite observation, somehow you can’t get yourself to forget it.

You know what it’s like to know something. You could know it further, but will it feel categorically different? or will you feel just like you do now, knowing what you already know?

I suppose this is why people have kids, to reset their curiosity vicariously through a being that knows nothing at all: to watch as the learning process begins anew, and maybe rediscover something themselves along the way. This can’t be the only way, though. There must be something I can do for myself, to unlearn all this knowing I’ve piled upon myself. Some form of amnesia…

But is this not what this whole journey has been about? 18 year-old Youtube videos of songs I barely remember; a video game whose storyline is a hazy mist; an anime I devoted myself to with all my heart, only to be left with a vague impression of cold-ness… I am Yuuichi, returning to a town I spent time in many years ago, trying to figure out what happened to me there. It was something important — this we can say for sure — but it’s not present to me anymore, it’s not there when I look for it. I can only sit with it, lonely in the dark, and wait for it to emerge, in fits and starts and then maybe all at once.

My memories are large and impossible. I don’t know anything about that world, and I have no agency. I could methodically make my way through a calendar, racking my brains to remember what I did in this month, on this day, and come up with nothing. I can only see them late at night, in the dark, through the medium of my computer screen. Events unfurl before me and I can’t even remember whether they were real or not.

In my regular waking life, my memories of high school are of long, boring days spent in classrooms, and of projects I never completed. I think of the consequences, or lack of consequences, that emerged from my educational failures. But that wasn’t my life back then, at all. I failed at school precisely because school was irrelevant to me. Instead, I lived in an alternate world of video games, anime, and K-pop, all joined together by online message boards. I lived late at night, when everyone else was asleep. I didn’t care about school; I didn’t care about careers; I didn’t care about being respectable or mature or anything at all. I neither knew, nor was interested in knowing, what it was like to be thirty years old.

I suppose we can say that I’m grown up now. I work with seventeen year-olds and all I can think about is helping them mature, and giving them advice. I can’t help but think of them as unfinished projects on their way to becoming something resembling myself. But that’s not what they are at all. They’re a different species, living in a different world: a world that’s often far more challenging and complex than the world I live in, although it sometimes seems the opposite. We think they’re so free & easy only because we live in an alternate dimension, concerned with problems that don’t even exist for them; meanwhile they deal with problems that we cannot perceive, for in our minds they are long “solved.”

It pays to look back sometimes, and not just look but truly travel back, to remember what the world looks like from ages gone by. More exotic than taking my current self to a different country, is occupying my past self and taking a walk through his world. He was complete, in his own way, even back then. He had things that I no longer have. He carried with him burdens I no longer know, and memories long lost to time. He wanted to cry, but he didn’t know how or where or when. Probably, sometimes, he wanted to be me, even though he couldn’t possibly imagine who I am. In some weird, twisted way, I’d like to be him, even though I know enough to know I shouldn’t.

It seems that time really does go by. Fifteen years can pass. Things that were once new do, in fact, become old. I suppose I knew that already. But there’s nothing I can do with this information, so I just let it flow back into obscurity. An endless cycle of forgetting and remembering that forgetting and remembering are even possible. I used to be young, once! And not just as a “man who would be me,” but as a man who was in each and every way himself!

And I will say the same thing in fifteen years, about the man who I claim to be today!