Typhoon No. 6 (Jangmi) has just passed through Shiga. Last night my wife had to drive to work for a night shift as it approached. I woke up several times listening to the wind howling around the house and didn't properly relax until I heard her car pull into the driveway the following morning.

That might sound strange coming from a Briton.

After all, Britain is famous for its weather. We talk about it constantly. We complain when it's too hot, too cold, too wet, too windy or too dry. Yet living in Japan has taught me that British weather and Japanese weather are playing entirely different games.

The lesson arrived rather dramatically in 2017.

Typhoon Lan was approaching Shiga. At the time I was teaching in Osaka. My company sent us home a little early and I caught the train north. Two stops before my station the train stopped. The JR Kosei Line runs on an elevated track and often closes when strong winds come down from the Hira mountains.

All the taxis had already disappeared, so I decided to walk.

At first it wasn't too bad. Then the rain became heavier. Then my umbrella broke. Half an hour later I was bent double against the wind, soaked to the skin, listening to Bach through my earbuds and wondering why Japanese people made such a fuss about storms.

When I finally reached home, the wind was furious.

Nothing, however, compared to my wife's fury.

"You walked home in a typhoon? How stupid are you?"

"It's just a little storm," I replied in my defence.

This turned out to be the wrong answer.

A couple of hours later roof tiles were flying through the village. Large metal road signs had been peeled from their poles and thrown across fields. Most impressively, nine concrete railway power poles on the JR Kosei Line were snapped in half.

My wife never did accept my meteorological expertise.

Part of the problem was that I had grown up in Britain.

The strongest storm I remember was the Great Storm of 1987. At the time I was working away from home and living in a caravan in an exposed work yard. During the night the caravan shook so violently that we thought it might end up somewhere over the North Sea, rather like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz.

We survived, but millions of trees were uprooted and enormous damage was caused across southern England.

Yet storms on that scale are unusual in Britain.

In fact, the words hurricane, typhoon and cyclone all describe the same type of storm. The name simply depends on where it occurs. In the Atlantic it is called a hurricane. In the western Pacific it is called a typhoon. In the Indian Ocean and South Pacific it is usually called a cyclone.

So why doesn't Britain get many of them?

The answer is geography.

Japan sits beside warm tropical waters that provide the energy needed to create powerful typhoons. Britain sits beside the much cooler North Atlantic. We are also far from active tectonic plate boundaries, which means no earthquakes, no tsunami and no volcanoes.

Thanks to the Gulf Stream, Britain is much warmer than most places at the same latitude. Winters are generally mild, and in much of the country snow is relatively uncommon.

That does not mean British weather is always easy.

Heavy snow can bring the country to a standstill. Trains are delayed by flooding, heat, leaves on the track and occasionally almost anything else that can be imagined.

The biggest transport catastrophe we experience is often too many wet leaves on the railway tracks.

Compared with Japan, however, the scale of our natural disasters is usually much smaller.

There are flooded villages. There are winter storms. There are occasional heatwaves.

But there is no annual typhoon season.

Living in Japan has given me enormous respect for the forces of nature. When a typhoon approaches, people prepare. Trains stop. Schools close. Weather warnings are taken seriously.

I understand that much better than I did in 2017.

After all, anyone who has seen nine concrete railway poles snapped in half tends to pay more attention to the forecast.