This one is not weather. The water in the paddies does not go anywhere on its own — the farmer opens the outlet and lets it out, three or four weeks before the harvest, so that the ground firms enough to carry a machine and the plant puts its last energy into the grain rather than the roots. The operation is called 落水. The calendar has taken a decision made by a person on a particular morning and written it down as though it were something the year did.
It does this more often than you would expect. 禾乃登 is the rice ripening, which is the plant's business; 水始涸 is entirely ours. Sitting three entries apart, they show the calendar quietly refusing to distinguish between the two — the farm year is one continuous thing and it does not matter much who is doing which part of it.
The Chinese source is more literal: in the 月令 tradition the phrase means what it says, the autumn waters running low. Japan kept the characters and read them agriculturally. Both are true in October, which is presumably why nobody bothered to fix it.
The season's tail. Later fish are leaner as they run south.
Holding at its autumn best.
A northern fish that is almost never sold fresh outside Hokkaidō, which is why most people only know it split and dried.
Full season. 柿が赤くなれば医者が青くなる — when the persimmons redden, the doctors pale.
Still going, and now cheap enough to be worth the peeling.
The last of the late varieties.
The main harvest is coming in through this kō and the next. This is the fortnight when the rice on the shelf changes over.
Cured and at its sweetest. The roasting vans start appearing.
Lifted in summer, but improved by two or three months of storage — one of the few vegetables that is better later.
The chrysanthemum shows start now and run through November, which is the honest season for the flower — 重陽, the chrysanthemum festival, sits back on 9 September and has been five weeks early ever since the calendar switched from lunar to solar in 1873. Hototogisu is named after the bird: the speckling on the petals was thought to match the bird's breast, and the plant carries the same name.
The harvest festivals run from late September through October and they are the second half of a sentence. In spring, at 祈年祭, the shrine asked the 氏神 for a crop; now, at the autumn festival, it reports back and hands over the first of it. 春祈秋報 — spring petition, autumn report. This is why autumn festivals are the loud ones, with the portable shrines and the floats and the drumming: the spring event is a request and is conducted politely, and the autumn one is a delivery. In the older agricultural picture the field god who came down to the paddies in spring goes back up to the mountain after harvest, and the noise is partly an escort.
"The character for rice is eighty-eight." — Split 米 and you can read 八十八, and the folk explanation is that rice takes eighty-eight separate operations between seed and bowl — the number turning up again in 八十八夜, the sowing date counted from 立春. Honest caveat: the etymology is invented. 米 derives from a pictograph of grains scattered on a stalk and has nothing to do with the number. But the eighty-eight jobs are not far wrong, and the saying survives because it is a good way of telling children to finish what is in the bowl.
涸 is 水 with 固, water and hardness — water gone solid, or gone. It is a stronger word than 乾 (to dry); 涸 is what a well does when it fails. Setting it against 始 (to begin) makes the phrase deliberately gradual: the beginning of the drying, not the drought. The Japanese reading 涸る (karu) is also the verb in 枯れる, to wither, and the two are hard to separate in older writing — the water going and the plant going are the same event described from different ends.
The rice belt, and the place where this kō is most literally true. Drainage and harvest across Akita, Yamagata and Niigata are largely done inside this window — from a train the paddies go from green to gold to shorn stubble in about a fortnight.
Ahead of everyone. 早場米 in parts of Kyūshū and Kōchi is drained and cut in August, so by early October the fields have been empty for weeks and a second crop may already be in.
Where draining is hardest and mechanisation has never really arrived. On terraces the water is moved by gravity from one plot to the next, so the order of draining is fixed by the shape of the hillside and has to be agreed between neighbours.
It is not a picturesque sight and that is the interest of it — cracked mud, stubble, the outlet still open. This is the calendar's actual subject for these five days.
Almost every shrine has one and most are not advertised beyond the immediate neighbourhood. Look for the notice board at the torii rather than a website.
No mixed rice, no seasoning, nothing on top for the first bowl. Shinmai is the one time of year when plain white rice is the dish rather than the accompaniment.
"In the autumn fields, the thatch of the harvest hut is coarse, and my sleeves are wet through with dew."
"The sun blazes on, indifferent to everything — and yet, the autumn wind."
New rice holds more moisture and goes off faster in a warm kitchen. An airtight container in the fridge rather than the bag it came in.
October storms are fewer but often larger, and this is the point in the year when they arrive with a crop still standing in some regions.
The gap between the dawn low and the afternoon high is at its widest in the year. Dress for both, not for the average.
The poem that opens the hundred-poet anthology — the one every Japanese schoolchild learns first — is an emperor complaining about a leaking hut in a wet field. He almost certainly did not write it and almost certainly never slept in one; it was attached to his name later, because a sovereign who has felt the dew through a bad roof is the kind of sovereign you want. That is a fiction, and it has been doing quiet work for a thousand years. What is not fiction is the hut. Somebody sat in one, all night, at this exact point in the season, keeping the birds off a crop that was three weeks from being cut and could still be lost. The emperor is borrowed. The cold sleeve is real. What's the flattering story wrapped around something in your own life right now — and what's the actual cold sleeve underneath it that's doing the real work?