The same plum described a few kō back (#23) as "still hard and green, exactly the state needed for umeshu," has moved on — turning yellow now, the point at which it's ready for umeboshi and eating rather than infusing. The fruit hasn't changed calendars; the calendar has simply caught up to what a few more weeks does to it.
梅雨 (tsuyu), the word for Japan's rainy season, is written with the characters for "plum" and "rain" — this exact overlap, plums ripening right as the rains set in, is the most commonly cited reason for the name. The reading tsuyu itself has two competing explanations: some trace it to 露 (tsuyu, dew, for how heavily the season coats every leaf), others to 潰ゆ (tsuiyu, "to burst" or "collapse," describing an overripe plum splitting open) — two words that may have simply merged in sound over time rather than one clearly winning out.
Coming properly into season now, especially prized in Kyoto, where its hundreds of fine bones are cut through with a technique precise enough to be a specialty in its own right.
Now yellowing and fragrant rather than hard and green — this is the stage for umeboshi and eating, not the umeshu window a few weeks earlier.
A notably nutrient-dense green, traditionally chopped fine until it turns naturally sticky, similar in texture to okra or nameko mushroom.
In full season and at its least bitter right now, before the summer heat intensifies its flavor.
Nejibana is a genuine wild orchid small enough to go unnoticed in an ordinary lawn, its tiny pink flowers spiraling up the stem in a corkscrew that's never quite identical from one plant to the next — proof that not every orchid needs to be rare or cultivated to be worth a second look.
Umeboshi curing traditionally starts right as the rains begin: plums salted and weighted under their own emerging brine for weeks, left alone through the wettest part of the year. Only once the rainy season actually breaks are they laid out to dry in direct sun — 土用干し (doyoboshi) — a final step that can't happen until the weather itself permits it. The whole process is bookended by the rainy season rather than any fixed date, plum work quite literally waiting on tsuyu to finish its own job first.
"A plum wards off that day's misfortune" — An old health proverb holding that eating one umeboshi a day keeps trouble away — grounded in something real: umeboshi's high citric acid content does have genuine antibacterial properties and was historically relied on by travelers passing through regions with unfamiliar local illness, well before germ theory existed to explain why it seemed to help.
The two competing explanations for tsuyu's reading — 露 (dew) and 潰ゆ (to burst) — aren't presented anywhere as settled, and it's worth resisting the urge to pick a favorite: this is a case where the historical record genuinely doesn't resolve, and the honest answer is that either, or some blend of both, may have shaped the word.
Okinawa's rainy season runs roughly a month ahead of the mainland's, meaning the region most associated with plums in the rest of Japan's imagination isn't actually experiencing tsuyu itself by the time this kō arrives — its own rains have typically already broken.
The salting stage needs to begin while plums are at this exact yellowing point — wait much longer and the fruit moves past the ideal window for curing.
It's easy to miss among grass at a glance — the spiral pattern only becomes obvious once you're looking closely at a single stem.
The doyoboshi sun-drying step is the final stage, not the first — moving too early risks the batch before the salt-curing has properly finished.
The bone-cutting technique (骨切り) takes real practice; most home cooks are better served buying it already cut from a fishmonger who specializes in it.
The exact same fruit, picked at two different points a few weeks apart, becomes two completely different things — hard and green for umeshu, soft and yellow for umeboshi — with no way to have both from a single plum. Waiting past the umeshu window doesn't ruin the fruit, but it does close off one outcome permanently in favor of another. What in your own life is currently at that fork — not spoiling exactly, just quietly deciding, by the day you finally act, which version of itself it's going to become?