This is the other end of a pair drawn across the whole year. In 寒露, back in early October, this same calendar welcomed the geese to Japan under the name 鴻雁来 (#49). Now, in 清明, it sends them home again — back to Siberia and Kamchatka, the same distance retraced in the opposite direction, timed so precisely that both kō sit almost exactly six lunar months apart.
As the geese lift off, the swallows that arrived just days earlier (#13) are settling in — the two migrations cross in the sky over Japan within the same short window, one flight ending here as the other begins.
Its own kanji is built from 魚 and 春 — literally "the spring fish" — at its best in the Seto Inland Sea region right around now.
A tart, thick-skinned summer orange that's actually eaten in spring, a naming quirk left over from when it was first classified.
Named for how the pod stands upright toward the sky as it grows — best simply boiled in the pod and salted.
A mountain vegetable with a crisp texture and faint bitterness, traditionally foraged wild before it was cultivated.
Hanadaikon's pale purple blossoms are often mistaken at a glance for wild phlox, and it spreads so readily along roadsides and riverbanks that it's easy to assume it's native — it was in fact introduced from China as a garden plant and escaped cultivation, another quiet border-crosser sharing this kō's theme.
April 1st is where Japan's business and school calendars both reset, entrance ceremonies (入学式) and new-hire ceremonies (入社式) clustering in this exact window. The date is often assumed to trace back to the cherry blossoms, but the real origin is more mundane: in 1886 the national treasury moved its accounting year to an April start, timed to when rice — the government's main source of tax revenue at the time — could be sold for cash after the autumn harvest. Schools followed for funding reasons, companies followed the schools, and the aesthetic coincidence with sakura season came afterward.
"The geese who stayed behind" — A late-spring season word for the birds — sick, injured, or simply not migrating — left in Japan after the rest of the skein has gone north. It's the quiet, poignant counterpart to autumn's 初雁 (hatsukari, the first goose to arrive): where that word marks a beginning everyone notices, this one marks an absence noticed only because everything else has already left.
帰る (kaeru), the verb in this kō's own reading, is the same word used for a person going home — to a hometown, a parent's house, a place that's still "home" even after years away. Using it for the geese rather than a more neutral "to fly off" or "to depart" quietly frames Siberia, not Japan, as where they actually belong; Japan was only ever the winter address.
Geese lift off from roosting wetlands and form into a loose V or diagonal line before the long flight north — most visible in the low light at either end of the day.
A private counterpart to autumn's tradition of marking the year's first arriving goose — a small, personal way to track the turn of the seasons.
"The geese depart, abandoning the spring haze as it rises — can they really be so used to living in a land without flowers?"
Entrance and new-hire ceremonies cluster in this exact window — a natural point to start something rather than waiting for January.
Banks, city offices, and schools all process their heaviest annual volume of new registrations right around the shinnendo changeover.
Six months ago, in 寒露 (#49), this same calendar welcomed the geese with a line from Issa: sleep easy now, the hard part is over. Now the hard part starts again, on a clock nobody taught them and every one of them somehow keeps anyway. Nothing forces the geese to leave a country that fed and sheltered them all winter — they leave because staying past what the season offered would cost them more than departing does. What are you still holding onto now, past the point it actually served you?