The 24 Sekki —
Japan's Micro-Seasons

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Bitter greens — nanohana, fukinotō — arrive to wake the palate from winter. The donabe still simmers nightly, and fresh tofu is warmed gently in kombu broth.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

On Setsubun eve, roasted soybeans are scattered at the door — fortune in, demons out — one bean eaten for every year of your life.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Hamaguri clams are at their best now, fat before the spawning season and still cheap enough to buy by the handful. They go into ushiojiru — a clear soup built on nothing but the clams and kombu, no katsuo dashi at all, so that what you taste is seawater and shellfish — poured into lacquer bowls light enough to lift to the mouth. The first cut wakame of the year comes in along the coast, brown as tea in the hand until it meets hot water and turns abruptly, startlingly green. And nanohana is at its peak, its bitterness answered by sesame ground down in a suribachi until the grains give up their oil.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

The hina dolls come out in these weeks, and putting them up on the first day of Usui is said to bring the daughter of the house a good match — a belief that leans on the festival’s origins in water. Before there were tiered dolls there were paper ones: a person’s misfortune was transferred to a flat figure and floated away downriver, a rite that survives as nagashi-bina. That is the auspicious half of a matched pair of superstitions. The other says a family slow to put the dolls away after March 3 will see the daughter marry late — and doll shops, who field the question every spring, will tell you it was most likely invented to get children to tidy up after themselves.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Sawara arrives wearing the season in its name — the fish whose character is written “fish” plus “spring” — crowding into the Seto Inland Sea to spawn, and best after a few days in sweet white miso, grilled as saikyō-yaki. On the hills the sansai season opens in earnest: tara no me, the buds of the angelica tree, go straight into tempura, with warabi and zenmai close behind. An old kitchen rule orders it all onto the table — haru no sara ni wa nigami o more, serve bitterness on the spring plate — the sharp green edge that was said to shake a body out of its winter feeding. And when the foraging has been good, sansai rice steams in the donabe, the mountain’s first vegetables folded through the year’s remaining grain.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Keichitsu is moving day in the old gardens. Since the Edo period, pines have been fitted each autumn with a komo — a straw wrap tied around the trunk about chest height — on the theory that caterpillars climbing down to overwinter would bed down in it, and the whole thing could be unwrapped at Keichitsu and burned, pests and all. The unwrapping, komo-hazushi, became the garden’s formal announcement of spring, and at castles and strolling gardens it is still performed on the day. The theory beneath it, though, has quietly collapsed: a five-year survey at Himeji Castle found the straw sheltered almost none of the pine-eating caterpillars it was meant to catch, and instead mostly their predators — spiders and assassin bugs — so the Imperial Palace grounds, the Kyoto Imperial Garden and eventually Himeji itself retired the practice. Where the wraps still go up, they are less trap than costume: a scarf the pines wear through winter, taken off on the calendar’s word that spring has come.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Botamochi is the equinox food — sweet azuki paste over rice, named for the peony about to bloom, the same sweet that returns in autumn as ohagi under the name of the bush clover. The usual explanation for the difference goes further than the flowers: azuki stored since the autumn harvest has toughened skins by spring, so the paste is strained smooth into koshian, while autumn’s new beans are tender enough to be left whole. The rice underneath is pounded with a surikogi only halfway — a state the kitchen cheerfully calls han-goroshi, “half-killed,” as against mochi proper, pounded until nothing of the grain survives. And on March 1 the fixed nets go out in Toyama Bay for hotaruika, the firefly squid that crowd inshore to spawn — boiled whole, and eaten with vinegared miso.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Higan, the week of grave visits around the equinox, is kept almost nowhere in the Buddhist world but Japan — India and China, which supplied the word, never kept the custom. The reasoning that grew around it is directional: on the equinox the sun sets due west, straight toward Amida’s Western Pure Land, and so twice a year the sun itself was held to point the way to the other shore — higan — where the ancestors wait. Folklorists suspect the Buddhism was draped over something older, a native sun-watching that marked the equinox long before the sutras arrived.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Bamboo shoots are at their peak. In the Otokuni hills southwest of Kyoto they are raised by what the prefecture calls the Kyoto softening method — the parent bamboo topped, straw spread across the whole grove in December, then soil laid over the straw — so the shoot climbs through a deep loose blanket and never meets daylight. Dug before it breaks the surface it stays pale, and the top grade, shirako-takenoko, is tender enough to eat as sashimi. Freshness here is a deadline rather than a preference: the compounds behind takenoko’s egumi, its scratchy bitter edge, build quickly once the shoot is cut, so it goes into the pot the same morning it leaves the ground — boiled with rice bran and a dried chili, the calcium in the bran binding up the oxalic acid. Then comes kinome-ae, a Kyoto dish so thoroughly the season’s that the name alone calls bamboo to mind: young sanshō leaves ground down in a suribachi with white miso until the ridges have bruised the scent out of them, folded through the cut shoots. The rest goes into the donabe as takenoko gohan.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

On the mainland Seimei passes almost unobserved — no dish, no rite attached to it. In Okinawa it is one of the largest events of the year. Shīmī, as the name is said there (Ushīmī around Shuri), arrived from China in the middle of the eighteenth century and stayed: an entire extended family converges on the clan tomb, and the tomb is built to receive them. Traditional Ryukyuan graves — the turtleback kind especially — set the vault behind a walled stone forecourt, a paved outdoor room meant for exactly this gathering. What is carried in is usanmi, tiered boxes packed with an odd number of dishes, nine being the usual count: pork belly braised with the skin on, kombu, burdock, konnyaku, fried tofu, fish cake, taro, tempura. It is offered to the ancestors, and then — the part that startles visitors — the family sits down on the stone and eats it. Mats come out, bottles are opened, children run between the tombs. The dead are not so much visited as included, at the same lunch.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Shincha arrives — the year’s first flush, cut as the tea rows come into bud, and the reason the eighty-eighth night means anything to people who do not farm. It wants cooler water and a shorter steep than the harvests that follow, poured from a kyūsu small enough to empty completely, because what you are chasing is a green top note the second and third pickings never have again. Hatsugatsuo runs up the Pacific on the Kuroshio in the same weeks — lean, barely fatted, and in Edo a mania: the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, annotating a print of the Nihonbashi fish market, records a kabuki actor paying three ryō for a single fish in 1812. What the Edo kitchen served with it was mustard rather than wasabi — karashi, or karashi-miso, cheap and everywhere in a century when wasabi was not. And broad beans are in, sold still in the pod for a reason: soramame is said to be worth eating for about three days, and shelling it starts the clock. The rest go into the donabe with the rice.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Near the end of Kokuu falls the eighty-eighth night — hachijūhachiya, the eighty-eighth day counted from Risshun, which lands on May 2 in an ordinary year and May 1 in a leap year. It is a zassetsu, one of the few calendar marks Japan added for itself: the twenty-four nodes came from the Yellow River basin and fit the Japanese year only roughly, so the almanacs supplemented them with dates that actually mattered here — the onset of the rainy season, the two-hundred-tenth day of typhoon risk, this one. The number is read as a picture as much as a count, since 八十八 stacked together is said to assemble the character 米, rice. What the date announces is the end of frost — wakare-jimo, the parting frost — and for tea that is not a metaphor: a late frost before the first picking burns the new buds outright, and Shizuoka held gatherings to pray the first flush safely through. Tea picked around the eighty-eighth night was held to keep you free of illness for the year. The belief has outlived the farming that produced it, largely on the strength of a Ministry of Education school song of 1912 that opens “summer draws near, the eighty-eighth night” — which is why most people in Japan know the phrase at all.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

The Japanese kitchen reads an ingredient in three stages — hashiri, the first of the year, prized mostly for being early; sakari, the peak, when it is both cheapest and best; nagori, the last of it, eaten with a little regret. Rikka is the fortnight when the labels change hands. New onions and spring cabbage slip into nagori; the first summer aubergines turn up as hashiri, costly and beside the point. At full sakari, meanwhile, is aji — horse mackerel, the plainest and most useful fish in the country. On the Bōsō Peninsula it becomes namerō: filleted, skinned, then chopped on the board with miso, spring onion and ginger until the fish gives up its shape entirely and goes soft. The Ministry of Agriculture’s record of the dish explains the miso as seamanship rather than taste — it was made on deck by fishermen, and soy sauce would have gone over the side with the first wave. The name is said to describe how the plate comes back: licked clean. Then on May 5 there is kashiwa-mochi in the east and chimaki in the west, a division that had more or less settled by the end of the Edo period.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

May 5 is Children’s Day now, but the festival underneath it has changed hands more than once. Tango arrived from China as a medicinal rite for the fifth day of the fifth month — mugwort and shōbu hung at the eaves, their scent held to turn away the sickness the coming heat would bring. In Japan it landed on top of something local and unrelated: satsuki-imi, a May abstinence in which the saotome, the young women who would set out the rice seedlings, shut themselves away to purify before planting. For a long stretch the fifth of the fifth was the women’s night. Parts of Chūbu and Shikoku called the day onna no ie, the women’s house, and in some villages the men left on the eve of the fourth while the women stayed inside under a roof thatched with iris and mugwort. What turned it around was a pun. Shōbu, the sweet flag, is a homophone of 尚武, the esteem of martial things, and on the strength of that the samurai centuries made the day a boys’ festival; the banners raised at warrior gates were reworked by townspeople into koinobori, after the Chinese carp that fights its way up the Yellow River, clears the Dragon Gate and is turned into a dragon. The plant itself is worth naming correctly, since it is almost always mistranslated: the shōbu of a shōbu-yu bath is Acorus calamus, sweet flag, an aromatic marsh plant of an entirely different family from the showy purple hana-shōbu it gets confused with. Only the fragrant one goes in the water. And the oldest layer survives too, in the small print — when the Holidays Act of 1948 named May 5 Children’s Day, it defined it as a day to respect the character of children and seek their happiness, and to thank mothers.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Two of the year’s shortest windows open now, and both are work rather than dinner. Mizanshō — the green, unripe berries of the sanshō tree — appear from the end of May into the first days of June and then are gone, which is why what you buy is a year’s supply rather than a meal’s. The preparation is tedious and unskippable: the berries arrive on fine twigs that have to be stripped off by hand, then boiled a few minutes and left in cold water — about an hour if you want the pepper to keep its bite, five or six for something milder, and longer as the weeks pass, because the harshness sharpens through June. What comes out of that goes into the freezer and keeps roughly a year, and the first of it usually goes straight into chirimen-sanshō, the Kyoto standby of tiny dried sardines simmered down with the berries until the pan is almost dry. Rakkyō is the other. The celebrated ones grow at Fukube, on dune fields beside the Tottori sands where the sand lies tens of metres deep and holds almost nothing — no spare water, no spare nutrients, and a constant wind off the sea — conditions that would ruin most crops and give these their hard white crunch; the name has carried a geographical-indication registration since 2016. Digging runs from late May into mid-June, and the moment the bulbs are out of the ground a clock starts, because a rakkyō trimmed at both ends will push new shoots from the cut faces within days. So it is bought by the kilo and dealt with the same evening: several hundred bulbs the size of a thumbnail, each needing its root plate and stem taken off, which is the most concentrated knife work the domestic year asks for and the fortnight when a genuinely sharp small blade stops being a luxury. The Ministry of Agriculture’s record of rakkyō-zuke sets out the two stages that follow — about ten days packed in salt, then about ten more in vinegar boiled with sugar and cooled, with a dried chili dropped in.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Okinawa does not so much observe Shōman as get rained on by it. The islands call their rainy season sūman bōsū, the two node-names — 小満 and 芒種 — run together into one word, and for once the imported calendar describes Japan with real precision: the Meteorological Agency’s 1991–2020 normals open Okinawa’s rains around May 10 and close them around June 21, which is very nearly these two fortnights exactly. The mainland is nowhere close; Kantō’s normal onset is June 7. The Ishigaki Local Meteorological Office lists sūman bōsū among the region’s weather sayings and is careful about what it is actually for — not the damp, but the warning, because this is the season when the heavy-rain disasters happen. The same page carries the saying that ends it: when the hārī gong sounds, the rains lift. Hārī takes its name from the Chinese word for dragon, and the dragon-boat racing it refers to is a petition to the sea for safe passage and a full catch. Itoman, the fishing town that keeps the most ceremonial version, still holds its races on the fourth day of the fifth month of the old calendar rather than on a convenient weekend, which lands them in the second half of June most years. The meteorologists append the disclaimer a weather service has to append — the boats are not what ends the rainy season, and some years the crews race in it.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

June is ume-shigoto — ume work — and the fortnight’s third micro-season names the trigger: the ume fruit turns yellow. Wakayama grows roughly six in every ten of Japan’s ume, and the towns of Minabe and Tanabe most of those, on hillsides the FAO listed in 2015 as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System — orchards on stony slopes that hold almost no water, above coppiced ubame-oak woods cut for binchōtan charcoal, with Japanese honeybees that take the ume’s nectar and pollinate the trees in return. The kitchen takes the fruit in two states. Green and hard in the first days of June it goes into umeshu: a kilo of fruit, the dried calyx flicked out of each one with the point of a bamboo skewer, layered with rock sugar in a wide-mouthed glass jar and covered with 1.8 litres of white liquor. Japanese law is specific about that last ingredient, because steeping fruit in spirits is technically the making of liquor — it is allowed at home only when the base is at least 20% alcohol and already taxed, and the result may not be sold. Then, as the same fruit ripens to yellow and begins to drop, it becomes umeboshi. The Ministry of Agriculture’s record of the Wakayama method is a fifth of the fruit’s weight in coarse salt, a weight on top, and a month in the vessel — the brine rises within two or three days — and then, once the rains lift, doyō-boshi: three or four consecutive clear days in the sun. The vessel is a glazed stoneware kame or glass rather than metal, which salt at that strength and the fruit’s acid will corrode. And two things come in from the water in the same weeks. Ayu, whose angling season opens on many rivers on June 1, is grilled whole on a skewer with salt and laid on a long plate. Nyūbai iwashi are the sardines landed at Chōshi in June and July, in the weeks before spawning, which the town says carry the most fat of the year — eaten raw, salt-grilled, or simmered.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

On the first Sunday of June the village of Mibu, up in the mountains of Kitahiroshima in Hiroshima, plants a rice field for the second time. The real transplanting is finished by then. Mibu no Hana Taue — the flower planting — is a performance of it for the rice deity, carried out by the Mibu and Kawahigashi communities with songs and steps handed down orally, and inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011. It opens at the shrine with the cattle: draft animals in elaborately decorated saddles and coloured necklaces, led to a field kept unplanted for the day and driven across it to work the mud. An elder carrying a sacred stick directs what follows. Girls in bright dress — the saotome, the same planting maidens who shut themselves away in May in the older layer of the Tango festival — take seedlings from a case and set them out one by one, walking backwards across the paddy in a line, to drums, flutes and small gongs, while an implement called the eburi, believed to hold the deity, is drawn across the field to level it. Rice planting was communal, wet, urgent work, and most of Japan has mechanised it out of memory. What Mibu keeps is the older understanding of it: that the year’s food had to be asked for as well as planted, and that the asking was done in song.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Cold somen noodles slip from glass bowls; new ginger and myōga sharpen the heat-dulled appetite. The iron kettle rests — barley tea is chilled instead.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

In parts of Kansai, octopus is eaten at Geshi — a wish that rice roots grip the earth as firmly as eight arms.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Hiyayakko — cold tofu under ginger and shiso — anchors the table in small glass bowls; edamame comes salted, watermelon after the bath. On Tanabata night, sōmen is served — its threads said to stand in for the Milky Way.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Shochū-mimai — midsummer greeting cards — are sent from Shōsho onward, asking after a friend’s health in the heat. Once autumn begins on the calendar, the phrase itself must change.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Doyō no ushi usually falls in these weeks — unagi glazed dark over rice, eaten to stand the heat. Kakigōri is shaved fine into glass; barley tea goes by the ladleful, never hot.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Uchimizu — water scattered on doorsteps and pavements at morning and dusk — cools the street by a degree or two, and says, quietly, that summer is being managed.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

The first nashi pears arrive, watery and cool; okra and myōga keep the dishes light while the heat lingers. The tetsubin still rests — barley tea over ice a while longer.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Obon falls within these weeks: fires are lit at the door to guide the ancestors home, and cucumber horses and eggplant oxen are set out — swift legs to carry them in, slow ones to carry them back.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Grapes and early pears take over the fruit bowl. The rice fields turn gold at the edges, and the kitchen begins, cautiously, to simmer again — nimono in the evening, stoneware back within reach.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Nihyaku-tōka — the two-hundred-and-tenth day from Risshun, around September 1 — was long feared for typhoons striking just as the rice flowered; a day for lashing down and watching the sky.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

The first sanma is grilled over open flame; chestnuts and young sake arrive. The donabe returns from the cupboard for the season’s first rice.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Tsukimi — on the harvest moon, dumplings and susuki grass are set by the window, an offering to the clearest moon of the year.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Ohagi — sweet rice wrapped in azuki paste — are made for the equinox. Mushroom rice steams in the donabe, and hiyaoroshi, sake rested through the summer, is poured into small cups.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Higan — the week around the equinox — is for visiting the family graves. As the saying goes, atsusa samusa mo higan made: both heat and cold last only until the equinox.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

New rice is fully in, steamed with chestnuts in the donabe; matsutake and shimeji scent the evening, and the year’s first nabe simmers as the nights turn cold. Persimmons ripen orange on bare branches.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Jūsan’ya — the “later moon” of the thirteenth night — follows the harvest moon in these weeks, honored with chestnuts and beans. To view one moon and not the other, they said, was katami-zuki: a luck left incomplete.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Ginnan is cracked from the shell and roasted in a heavy pan until it turns jade. Satoimo and carrot simmer down in the donabe, and sweet potatoes are roasted whole until the skin blisters. Greens and daikon caught by an early frost turn sweeter — the plant quietly converting its stored starch to sugar to keep from freezing.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Kogarashi ichigō — the first “withering wind” of the year — is announced like news when it comes: the weather agency declares it only once each season, and only for Tokyo and the Kinki region. Every wind after that is simply winter’s.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Nabe season starts in earnest — the donabe on the table most nights, hakusai and negi cooked down in broth until they turn sweet. Oysters come in as the water cools and buri starts to take on its winter fat; the tetsubin goes back on the heat and sings through the afternoon.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Inoko — the day of the Boar in the tenth lunar month — was when the hearth and the kotatsu were lit for the first time each year. The boar belongs to water among the five elements, so its day was thought to hold fire in check; in the tea room, the same day opens the ro, the sunken winter hearth, at a gathering tea people call their New Year.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Daikon is at its sweetest now and does most of the work: cut thick and simmered slow in the donabe, or grated raw against an oroshigane to sit beside grilled fish. Whole radishes hang in pairs from the eaves, drying in the cold wind until they can be curled into a hook — the sign they are ready for the takuan crock. The first mikan arrive by the netted bagful, within reach of anyone sitting still.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Niinamesai falls on November 23: the Emperor offers the year’s new rice to the gods and then eats it alongside them, a rite whose name reaches back to the Nihon Shoki. It was a national holiday under that name until 1948, when it was renamed Labor Thanksgiving Day — and older custom held that no one touched the new crop until the offering had been made.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Buri is the fish of these weeks, heavy with fat before it spawns. Along the Sea of Japan the thunder that arrives with the first winter storms is called buri-okoshi, the “yellowtail rouser,” and the fish is said to come down the coast behind it. Thick steaks simmer with daikon in the donabe, or turn once in hot broth and are lifted out. In Kanazawa this is the month for kabura-zushi: salted turnip split around a slice of buri, layered with kōji rice and put under a weight to ferment slowly toward New Year.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

The eighth of December is one of the koto-yōka, the paired eighth days of the twelfth and second months that close and open the year’s work. Needles broken over the year are not thrown away but retired — pushed into a block of tofu or konnyaku, something soft after a life of hard cloth, and left at a shrine. Kansai generally keeps the December date and Kantō the February one; the best-known needle mound is at Awashima Shrine in Wakayama, whose deity Sukunahikona is said to have brought the sewing needle to Japan.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Kabocha simmered sweet with azuki, said to guard health through winter. The tetsubin sings all day; hot sake is poured into small cups.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Yuzu-yu — whole yuzu floated in the evening bath, their oils warming the body against the cold to come.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

On the seventh comes nanakusa-gayu — rice simmered thin in the donabe with the seven spring herbs, eaten in the morning to give a stomach three days into New Year feasting something plain to do. Two of the seven are ordinary vegetables under older names, suzuna and suzushiro, turnip and daikon; the first of them, seri, is the plant this node is named for, and around Sendai it goes into the nabe whole, roots and all. On the eleventh the New Year mochi comes down, gone hard and cracked — opened by hand or wooden mallet, never a blade, and simmered into zenzai with azuki.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

Water drawn in these weeks — kan no mizu — was held to keep without turning, and the ninth day of kan, around January 13th or 14th, yields the most prized draw of all: kanku no mizu. One Niigata brewery has sent its people up Mount Suganadake for spring water on that day every January since 1992, hauling it back down the snow twenty kilos at a time. The reasoning under the ritual is plain enough — cold water carries little to spoil it, and low temperatures let fermentation take its time — which is why miso, soy sauce and sake are all laid down in the kan, and why brewing became winter work for farmers whose own season had closed.

THE TABLE IN THIS SEASON — この季節の食卓

Eggs are the season’s small luxury. Hens once nearly stopped laying in deep cold, so the few that came — from birds that had eaten hard all autumn — kept a reputation for richness, and daikan tamago are still sold as a lucky food, laid on the day of Daikan or anywhere across its fortnight depending on who you ask. The money-luck reading is a later gloss borrowed from the colour yellow; the older claim was simply that the yolk stood taller. Either way the egg wants plain cooking — rolled slowly in a tamagoyaki pan, or broken raw over hot rice. Meanwhile the first fukinotō push up where the snow has thinned, bitter enough that they are always parboiled and soaked before use; Japan’s agriculture ministry notes that this old step does real work, drawing off water-soluble compounds better not eaten in quantity. Ground into fuki-miso in a suribachi, they go a long way in small dark spoonfuls.

A CUSTOM KEPT — 暮らしの知恵

These are the only weeks cold enough for a class of foods made by freezing rather than by fire. In the Suwa basin of Nagano, tokoroten jelly is cut into bars and laid out in open fields through the depth of winter — three days or so to freeze through, then thawing by sun and freezing again by night for about twenty days in all, until what remains is white, brittle and almost weightless. That is kaku-kanten, natural agar, and it is said to be made nowhere else in Japan. The method arrived around 1830 with a peddler from what is now Chino, who brought it home from Tanba in Hyōgo, and it stayed because the basin happens to be high, dry and clear-skied, with nights far below freezing and sun enough to lift the ice off by day. Farther north, firm tofu is sliced, strung on straw rope and hung outdoors to do the same thing — shimi-dōfu. In a kitchen year otherwise organised around heat, Daikan is the fortnight when the cold itself is the equipment.