Japan records first 'cruelly hot day' as heat extremes reshape daily life

Japan has given a name to a new kind of suffering: kokushobi, the 'cruelly hot day,' a term coined only in April and already pressed into use by mid-July as three cities crossed 40 degrees Celsius and records fell across the archipelago. The naming is itself a kind of reckoning — an acknowledgment that the old vocabulary of heat no longer holds, that what was once extreme has become a threshold on the way to something worse. A nation historically attuned to seasonal ritual and collective discipline is now rewriting its dress codes, its farming practices, and its sporting traditions in real tim