How gloomy is the weather?

I am from the Pacific Northwest and, while it’s not a dealbreaker, we are ideally looking to get out of the Seattle-esque gloom and especially the freezing cold winters. I don’t mind strings of rainy days, but just constant clouds with no rain or anything gets so depressing. Harsh winters kill my mood so bad. We live in an area with shitty weather about 8 months of the year, and it is quite depressing. One year it got like 20f below. I just can’t do that anymore lol.

I hear parts of Kyushu has milder winters. I also hear Okayama is lovely weather wise.

I struggle to make sense of statistics like sunlight hours etc, so I was curious of people’s day to day experiences in Japan with regard to how gloomy it is/how harsh winters are, how it affects your mood, etc. I’ll take any sort of improvement over what we have here.