Why Japan Counts 72 Microseasons

To accompany this essay, the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi created an original series, “Kaze Hikaru” (Glittering, 2025), based on things growing for six weeks between February and March near where she lives in Futtsu, in Chiba Prefecture. “The changing of the seasons is a theme that’s connected to my personal work, so it came naturally to me,” she says. “In particular, the transition from winter to spring evokes special emotions: In Japan, spring is the beginning of a new year [with] graduations [and] school admissions. It’s like the budding of new buds that people are moving into new stages of their lives.”

WE WALK IN the cool dark along the flank of Mount Wakakusa. It’s early November and the grocery stores are stocked with the foods of a Japanese autumn: sujiko, raw salmon roe, the eggs sweet and red, still clinging together inside the skein; skinny silver sanma, Pacific saury, whose telltale sign of freshness is a yellowing at the lip, like a buttery kiss; peeled, wrinkly chestnuts; grapes as taut as balloons; pears, apples and persimmons bigger than fists, cradled individually in white netting; preroasted sweet potatoes with cracks and oozy seams, testimony to caramelization; matsutake mushrooms with fat kinked stalks, bundled two for 5,000 yen (around $33) with edible chrysanthemums and a single kabosu, a citrus that is kin to yuzu, a squeeze of its juice enough to highlight the mushrooms’ flavor without overpowering their scent.

Although the Japanese government officially adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, the spirit of the traditional Japanese calendar persists. Modeled after the lunisolar Chinese calendar introduced in the early seventh century by a Buddhist priest from the Korean Peninsula, it divides the year into 72 ko, or microseasons, each no more than a handful of days long, with evocations like “fish emerge from the ice” (mid-February), “rotten grass becomes fireflies” (mid-June) and “rainbows hide” (late November). According to this trajectory, winter has already begun. Nov. 7 through 11 is designated as the time when camellias thrust forth their showy, swaddled heads; next week, according to this system, a freeze should settle across the land. And yet this afternoon in Nara the temperature peaked at 71 degrees, and I had to shuck my coat and sweater as I dragged my suitcase uphill from the train station.

By day, the streets of this former eighth-century capital are thronged with tourists, here to pay homage to (or simply Instagram) the 1,300 wild sika deer, who, sanctified as messengers of the gods, roam the city at will or, more often, just stand still, blocking sidewalks, lifting damp eyes filled with — is it world-weariness? indifference? — as the phones click. They are holy troublemakers: Signs warn that the males, in particular, are prone to kicking, biting and butting. Thus far one has tried to eat my sleeve. (The deer’s onetime predator, the Honshu wolf, itself historically revered at dedicated shrines, is believed to have been hunted to extinction by the early 20th century after a rabies epidemic turned many into aggressive, froth-mouthed killers; a statue in the logging village of Higashi-Yoshino, some 30 miles away in the northern Kii Mountains, honors the last of its kind, shot in January 1905, its pelt and skull preserved at London’s Natural History Museum.)

By night, my friend and I walk alone, low wooden houses to our left and the shadowy bulk of the mountain to our right. When the houses stop, there is enough light from the quarter moon for us to keep going until we see the lanterns of Nigatsudo, one of the temples in the monumental Todaiji complex, and climb the stone steps and pour cold water from the fountain over our hands to purify ourselves. At this hour, all the doors are shut. Such is the price for losing the crowd. We stand on the balcony, famous for its panoramic view of Nara, and see only dark. But the quieter it gets, the more we hear. The silence bristles. Then a high, eerie sound cuts through the chittering of crickets (Oct. 18-22: “crickets chirp around the door”). It repeats, each cry bursting and falling like a spray of fireworks. It’s not a shriek, howl or yip, more like a hawk’s “scree.” Fumbling, I hit record on my phone. The deer are crying.

The 17th-century poet Basho was the first to render the deer’s cry phonetically, as “bii,” drawn out and lingering until all that’s left is that attenuated “eeeee.” But the sound has been deployed in Japanese literature as a trope of autumn for at least 1,200 years. The “Hyakunin Isshu,” an anthology compiled in the 13th century that’s still taught in primary schools, includes this poem, purportedly written for a contest sponsored by an imperial prince in the late ninth century:

When I hear the voice

of the stag crying for his mate

stepping through the fallen leaves

deep in the mountains — then is the time

that autumn is saddest.

The grammar is unclear: Who, exactly, is stepping through the fallen leaves — the poet or the stag? Is the uncertainty the point? In reading the poem, do we, too, become both stag and poet, lonely wanderers in a season of endings?

In truth, when I first hear the deer’s cry, I find it slightly creepy. It registers as an obsessive mewling, somewhere between a squeak and a bleat, like the accusing voice of a kidnapped mouse gnawing at the fringe of consciousness. Only later, as I replay the recording on my phone, does the sound turn mournful and ethereal, as the ancients must have heard it. Our world would be unrecognizable to them now, and yet every autumn the deer still cry, after all these centuries, unconsoled.

THE SEASONS LOOMED large in the lives of early humans, whose survival depended on anticipating and adapting to shifts in climate. Given limited tools to control the elements, peoples across the world devised ornate ceremonies (and the occasional blood sacrifice) in hopes of pleasing and appeasing fickle gods who could unleash a crop-destroying frost or a cloud of locusts with the twitch of an eye. The earliest extant calendars — a configuration of Mesolithic pits in Scotland arranged nearly 10,000 years ago to capture sunrise on the winter solstice; the Sumerian division of the year into two seasons, of sowing and reaping; the Mayan system of interlocked solar and sacred cycles that remains astonishingly accurate to this day — were both predictive and administrative devices. Rituals, as repeated acts yoked to moments in time, were essential. “They structure time, furnish it,” the philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in “The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” (2020). “They are to time what a home is to space: They render time habitable.”

Much of our deference to season has fallen away as advances in technology create the illusion that we’ve triumphed over time and place. Greenhouses, refrigeration and genetic engineering mean we can eat pretty much anything we want whenever we want (if we have the resources to do so). Citizens of developed nations might imagine themselves no longer in thrall to nature, even as temperatures spike, crops wither, glaciers melt and wildfires rage.

In modern Japan, however, the seasons are as much an ontological framework as they are observable phenomena. For over a millennium, a commitment to honoring the infinitesimal shadings of a passage around the sun has permeated and shaped thought and worldview here as perhaps nowhere else on earth. It’s a perspective manifest in the loftiest of the arts and in mass-market kitsch (as I’m reminded when I see, at a supermarket, purple-and-white plushies with grape bunches for heads alongside real grapes, part of fall’s bounty); in the reverence of kaiseki, the elaborate multicourse meal whose aesthetics have shaped modern Japanese cuisine, and in cheap konbini (convenience store) snacks, like the plastic cups of kabocha pudding and Mont Blancs topped with noodly squiggles of chestnut cream that line the shelves at 7-Eleven at this time of year; and in the dozens of seasonal festivals, big and small, when you might gather at night to gaze at the moon, fat and ripe in a cloudless fall sky, or wait in long lines to eat fresh sanma, known as “autumn’s fish,” thousands charred on open grills and given out for free by cooks armed with goggles so their eyes don’t tear up from all the smoke.

As the Japanese literary scholar Haruo Shirane writes in “Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons” (2012), seasonality has been sustained as a dominant theme across almost all cultural genres. It’s prevalent in literature, theater, painting, decorative arts — from ikebana to byobu (folding screens) — and food, once considered beneath aesthetic consideration but exalted during the Edo period (1603-1868), when the center of government was moved to the coast, particularly in kaiseki and wagashi (confections), which were intended as much for contemplation as for physical nourishment and sensual indulgence. By the 19th century, kigo, words used in formal poetry to signify different seasons, numbered in the thousands.

Is geography destiny? Japan is host to some of the world’s most severe weather: swollen summer days of enervating humidity and monsoon rains to rival those in the tropics, and winter snowfalls that are among the heaviest ever measured. Further besiegements include earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons. In contrast, the representation of nature in Japanese culture is largely idyllic and harmonious — “what aristocratic society or culture wanted nature to be rather than what it actually was,” Shirane writes: a response to “the constant threat posed by the wild, uncontrolled aspects of nature and the need to defend against them.” (Even today, depictions of natural disasters can cause unease; in 2011, after an undersea earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and an ensuing tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people, the beloved 2008 Hayao Miyazaki film “Ponyo,” in which raging waves overwhelm a cliffside town, was suspended from being broadcast for months.) Against the brutality of summer and winter, autumn and spring — those brief transitions between states of extremity — became in the hands of poets the most expressive seasons.

It was easier to idealize nature from a distance. The British linguist and critic Ivan Morris notes in “The World of the Shining Prince” (1964) that for medieval aristocrats in Heian Kyo (today Kyoto), the capital from 794 to 1868, travel to the countryside — that is, the rest of Japan — was a soul-crushing matter of clumsy ox-drawn carriages lucky to eke out two miles an hour, bumping along scratches of road that were seasonally erased by rain. But the isolation of the Heian court wasn’t merely literal. It was a turning inward: By the 10th century, the Fujiwara clan had effectively seized political power from the emperor, leaving his entourage with little to do but devote themselves to the painstaking refinement of Japanese arts and culture.

Shirane offers a 13th-century story about a priest who stumbles upon a weeping boy and assumes it’s because the cherry blossoms are falling from the trees. Don’t be sad, the priest says kindly; nothing can be done. In fact the child is thinking about different flowers entirely, the barley flowers in his father’s field, which if knocked off by the wind will bear no grain. He’s not musing on the ephemerality of life. He’s afraid of going hungry.

And yet the priest isn’t wrong. Whether falling cherry blossoms or barley flowers or a life quenched like a candle, nothing can be done. Rituals and refinement could be deflection and defense, even denial, an attempt to hide from ourselves the vulgar insistence of human needs — or the opposite: an embrace of fate and a way to make sense of it. To see in it beauty.

IN THE MORNING, my friend and I ride 20 minutes by taxi to the nearby city of Tenri. There, among giant cedars, we pay our respects to Isonokami Jingu, one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan, the foundation date of which is unknown but which had risen to prominence by the end of the third century. Roosters with swooping black tail feathers peck for bugs in the gravel. This is one end of the Yamanobe-no-Michi, a road mentioned in records from the eighth century. Mostly narrow and unpaved, the part of the path commonly used by hikers today runs around seven miles from here to Sakurai, temple to temple, longer with detours, all the trails we don’t have time to take: sly turns in the undergrowth or eroded steps disappearing up toward a pale torii (or gate) in the middle of the trees, marking a boundary between one world and another.

The forest soon gives way to open countryside, where the only crowds are persimmon trees, arms outstretched and heavy with golden fruit. We wind through sleepy hamlets and past improvised fruit and vegetable stands in garages and aluminum-sided sheds. Some are little more than a stack of yellow plastic crates against a wall or wooden planks on cinder blocks, the goods left unattended, payment on an honor system, with handwritten prices and, in one case, a beer can on a hook to slip money into.

Persimmons are everywhere, round and squat under leafy caps, orbs the dusky yellow of marigolds or tiger orange with a sheen like a candy apple’s. One vendor hands us cut wedges as we pass, the flesh freckled, crunchy and barely sweet. The next batch, farther on, is wholly different, almost gooey, collapsing on the tongue. In someone’s driveway, we take seats alongside strangers at a picnic table and impatiently peel back the foil around yaki imo, creamy roasted sweet potatoes, then cool our singed fingers on bright chunks of persimmon, which here taste of honey and are soft without wholly surrendering structure. Our host pours us persimmon-leaf tea, mild and vegetal, and from the steam comes the fruit’s sunny scent.

As there are microseasons within each season, likewise within the life of an ingredient. Hashiri is the word for the early days, when the ingredient is still in the process of becoming and has a touch of resistance, its bite bracing and clean. (Sometimes it’s too soon, as with persimmons whose unmellowed tannins parch the mouth.) “You’re so excited in the cold of winter to see the first bamboo shoots and know that spring is coming,” says the chef Zaiyu Hasegawa, 46, acclaimed for his modern reimagining of kaiseki at Den in Tokyo. (Hatsumono is another term for this stage: literally, “first things.”) The 42-year-old chef Yoshihiro Imai, whose serene, shadow-dappled restaurant, Monk, stands off a narrow stone walk along a mossy canal in Kyoto known as the Philosopher’s Path, sees in this annual recurrence a connection to the past. “At the beginning of June, the first Kamonasu eggplant arrives,” he says, referring to a prized local variety that’s the inky purple of a bruise. “And for a thousand years, people have said the same thing: ‘Now it is summer.’”

These pioneers are typically the most expensive but, as Hasegawa notes with a smile, “not the most delicious.” That honor goes to shun, the peak, when a persimmon, for example, starts to break down and the flesh grows irresolute, ready to slouch into jam, and you can just stab in a spoon and scoop it up. Even at the end of its life, when a fruit is overripe and approaching mush, it has worth. Ayako Yuki, 59, a brand strategist for Ikigai Fruits, which last year started exporting to the United States the harvest of small Japanese farms — including crown muskmelons, grown one to a vine, the rind massaged by hand to coax out more sweetness, then boxed individually like premium whiskey and, in Japan, sold for up to 30,000 yen (around $200) a pop at luxury fruit parlors, the perfect high-end gift for your boss — thinks that the final moments of a melon might be its loveliest, the juice concentrated and deep, flagrant in its bid for flavor.

The Japanese attunement to season goes far beyond what in the West is often called farm to table — a phrase that originated in an early 20th-century American postal initiative to encourage consumers to order food directly from those who produced it. This idea was later taken up as a countercultural ethos by chefs in California in the 1970s and activists in the European Slow Food movement in the 1980s who championed ingredients anchored in time, place and the labor of independent individuals versus the global proliferation of corporate, intensively processed goods. In this context, eating what’s in season is often cast as a political choice (and a privileged position, since seasonal ingredients are typically more expensive).

This may partly explain why, despite the prevalence of places with seasonal menus around the world — and the enormous popularity of Japanese cuisine abroad — kaiseki has never gained a significant audience in the West. The issue is not the inherently high cost, often into the many hundreds per person. But for those who can afford such meals, the expectation is often food that’s overtly luxurious in size and heft, like a giant marbled slab of beef, or else that pushes boundaries and redefines the very experience of eating, as at Noma in Denmark and Central in Peru. Of the three restaurants in Japan on the 2024 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, the top two were French. The lone representative of kaiseki was Den, where Hasegawa has expressly sought to make the tradition more accessible for foreign diners, adding foie gras to monaka (a kind of wagashi, here presented in a paper wrapper, as it might appear at 7-Eleven), topping a salad with a coin of carrot cut into a smiley face with heart-eyes emoji and presenting immaculately fried chicken stuffed with sticky rice in a cardboard box styled à la KFC.

Hasegawa’s cooking is exquisite and precise but also has an element of theater. A meal at Seiwasou, one of Kyoto’s temples of kaiseki, is quieter, a series of austerely beautiful plates, each dainty bite the more vivid for there being so little of it, and for its ephemerality: With each day, the ingredients subtly change in flavor, until they’re gone. The last stage of a food’s life is nagori, which translates as “traces” or “remains” and comes freighted with the sorrow of goodbye — or, depending on your perspective, the greedy joy of seizing one last chance to indulge in something that gives you pleasure. For the truly enlightened, it may be both at once. “It’s nostalgic,” Hasegawa says. “ ‘Thank you and see you next year.’”

FOR IMAI, EACH season’s harvest has a purpose and a story: the bitterness of mountain vegetables in spring to help you purge everything you’ve been holding inside all winter; the cooling juiciness of cucumber and eggplant in summer; the relief in autumn when the heat relents and then the loneliness as plants start to die. Working on his farm in the mountains to the north of Kyoto last winter, the chef was surprised to brush off a heaping of snow and find “this small plant surviving the crazy winter night,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t survive. I have so much respect.” The vegetables write the menu, he says. That is, the seasons write it, this narrative that loops back on itself year after year.

Except the seasons are drifting. Last summer was the hottest on record, and crops of koshihikari rice practically ossified in the fields. In the ensuing shortage, with private sector reserves at an all-time low, some supermarkets permitted customers only one bag per household. Higher ocean temperatures and declining river levels have starved seaweed of essential nutrients, leading to poor harvests and discoloration. (“When the fishermen pull up the seaweed, it’s yellow instead of black,” Yuki says.) Fish that once swam in the waters off Kyushu have migrated north to Hokkaido, where local fishermen have no experience in handling them. Six years ago, in early April, my first meal at Den ended with a pot of rice whose lid, when lifted, revealed a constellation of sakura ebi, tiny, pink translucent shrimp scattered like fallen blossoms; now, Hasegawa says, the shrimp can be delayed long enough to eat with summer corn. “A new idea,” he muses.

Climate change has disrupted food systems across the globe. It’s disrupting time too. For the seasons are the foundation of every calendar, and what is a calendar but our meager human attempt to tame and harness unruly time, of which we never have enough? How a society metes out its days — the hours we partition for work and rest, when we choose to celebrate and to mourn — reveals something of its resistance or submission to the cycle of human life, and whether this is seen as an individual or communal journey.

In the West, winter is the time of bleakness and barrenness, a dark night of the soul. But with spring comes resurrection — a vanquishing of death and of the natural order itself. This is in keeping with an insistence that nature is the dominion of humans and something to be subdued. But for the Japanese, Morris, the British linguist, writes, “man is an integral part of the natural world, his role being not to fight nature but rather to put himself in harmony with it and, if necessary, to suffer its inconveniences” — reflecting both the animism of Shinto, the country’s indigenous religion, which holds that spirit resides in all things, and the first of the Buddhist noble truths, that suffering is simply a part of existence. Here the seasons are not a metaphor. They are something to be lived through, and with. “In sadness there is a kind of beauty,” Imai assures me.

On Nov. 6, the day before I landed in Tokyo, a dusting of white descended on Mount Fuji — the latest that snow has arrived in autumn since such matters were first recorded 130 years ago. When I booked my Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets from Tokyo to Kyoto and back, only a few window seats were left on the side with a clear sightline to the mountain. I was determined to witness it, but my body was still half on New York time and, each way, I fell asleep.

Now I think of the wintry peak unseen, the trails untaken, the darkness from the temple balcony in Nara. I find another poem in the “Hyakunin Isshu,” this one from the 12th century: