Late September, almost a month into autumn. Walking by Kamogawa in Kyoto at night. The air has cooled slightly, the intense humidity has finally lifted. The nouryou-yuka remain, raised wooden decks constructed each summer, allowing people to dine and drink while overlooking the river. This yearly tradition is now extended an extra month, until the end of October. The warm lights from restaurants reflect and shimmer in the water. The silence of the night is broken by the presence of insects. It still feels like summer.
Returning to a temple I regularly visit, my first time since early July. Its energy changes with the seasons: vibrant and alive in spring; green, verdant and hot in summer; melancholic and beautiful in autumn; cold and reserved in winter. As I walk along the pathway, turning and slowly leaving behind the outside, what is immediately noticeable are the scars on the ground. The moss, normally so lush and moist, is dry and brown. Evidence of the harsh summer that is tardily departing. A few leaves are starting to turn crimson, but it does not feel like autumn.
I am fortunate to find myself at a kaiseki dinner, a Japanese course menu carefully prepared and beautifully presented. Through the ingredients used and the artful presentation, the dishes announce that autumn has arrived. As I enjoy the delicious food, I also appreciate the air-conditioned room, it might have cooled somewhat at night, but it still feels like summer.
Thoughts of a thousand things
fill me with melancholy
as I gaze upon the moon,
but autumn’s dejection
comes not to me alone.
This is poem 23 by Oe no Chisato in Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each), a famous volume of poetry in Japanese literature, assembled by the scholar Fujiwara no Teika in around 1230–40. One of the most obvious themes in the collection is the centrality of the seasons, life lived in reference to the natural world. The translator Peter MacMillan explains:
Along with love, nature is especially prominent in the collection. … Autumn was a particularly popular theme, with poems on this season greatly outnumbering those on spring (fifteen, compared to six) and a scene of autumnal melancholia opens the collection. The autumn poems almost invariably paint a forlorn, melancholic image of the season, as in poems 5, 23 and 47. Important exceptions are poems 17 and 69, by Narihira and Noin respectively, which focus on the stunning beauty of the autumnal foliage. Rather than being a matter of individual taste, the emphasis on desolate, melancholic autumnal scenes was characteristic of the period in which Teika lived – a troubled time of warfare and profound political and social change. Beauty and sadness do not exclude one another in the collection, but work together to create a picture of restrained elegance.
Two of the defining metaphors of Japanese classical poetry are the cherry blossom and maple. More than any other plants, cherry blossoms and maples embody the strong love of the Japanese for the four seasons, especially spring and autumn.
When living in Japan one does not need such scholarly introductions, the importance of seasons is clear and immediately felt. The circular rhythm of these regular changes is a vital part of what it means to be part of this country.
And so, Japan is a deeply seasonal culture. Autumn is the most Japanese of seasons, and Kyoto is the most Japanese of cities. What does it mean when that regularity breaks down? When autumn is delayed, and spring is hurried forward? Summers stretched, winters shortened, typhoons more irregular and violent, what does that portend? When the extremes swallow up the middle, what is left? What does it mean for ways of living and feeling imprinted with nature’s patterns?
Certainly Japan might remain deeply seasonal aesthetically, but practically, it has fully imbibed the logic of technics and the practices of late capitalism. The ever-present convenience store open 24-7 offers one of the most stark examples of the abandonment of the structures of the natural world. Jonathan Crary suggests:
24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits. It is aligned with what is inanimate, inert, or unageing. … The absence of restraints on consuming is not simply temporal. We are long past an era in which mainly things were accumulated. Now our bodies and identities assimilate an ever-expanding surfeit of services, images, procedures, chemicals, to a toxic and often fatal threshold. The long-term survival of the individual is always dispensable if the alternative might even indirectly admit the possibility of interludes with no shopping or its promotion. In related ways, 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.
Food is one of the ways that Japan’s appreciation of the seasons is traditionally presented. Here we can also see a clear example of how they are now disregarded, with strawberries becoming a winter fruit. Hiroko Tabuchi writes:
We’ve come to a point where many people think it’s natural to have strawberries in winter,” said Satoko Yoshimura, a strawberry farmer in Minoh, Japan, just outside Osaka, who until last season burned kerosene to heat her greenhouse all winter long, when temperatures can dip well below freezing.
… most farmers have stopped growing strawberries during the far less lucrative warmer months, the actual growing season. Instead, in summertime Japan imports much of its strawberry supply.
Japan’s swing toward cultivating strawberries in freezing weather has made strawberry farming significantly more energy intensive.
In many regards this is effectively a Japanese manifestation of a more basic problem of energy blindness and an unwillingness to see the material consequences of the world we collectively find ourselves in. We eat our strawberries, not knowing where they came from or at what cost, but they do taste nice. And if they spoil, we throw them out and buy more. Indeed, the increasingly superficial celebration of seasons here could actually mislead residents of Japan into believing we are more attentive to nature than is the case. With the country just emerging from its most extreme summer on record, an experience it shared with much of the Northern Hemisphere, perhaps there might be increasing honesty in facing the climate changes that appear to be unfolding. Or perhaps not.
The challenge is how to live with these changes? How can we find ways to collectively act that overcome the logics that so powerfully encourage us not to? And how to do so in ways that are humble and open, conscious of the difficulties of acting in a complex and ultimately unknowable world? How to find the balance between urgency and caution? Poetry might not provide any answers, but it can offer some reminders.
To finish, another poem, this one from Fujiwara no Toshiyuki in Kokin Wakashū (Collection of Japanese Poems of Ancient and Modern Times), of which the first six volumes are devoted to the separate seasons that have marked and shaped life:
That autumn has come
isn’t yet clear to my eyes
so unseeing though
the sound of the wind makes me
of a sudden realize.