Japan does not simply observe the four seasons. It counts them in twenty-four parts, and then seventy-two more. Behind this precision lies a philosophy of eating that has quietly shaped Japanese cuisine for over a thousand years.
In Japan, the question of what to eat is inseparable from the question of when. Not in the practical sense of opening hours or availability, but in a deeper, more philosophical sense: the belief that every ingredient has a moment — a brief window of time when it is most fully and completely itself. To eat it then is to experience it properly. To eat it at any other time is to settle for something diminished.
This belief has a name: shun (旬). And it is one of the most fundamental organising principles of Japanese food culture.
What Shun Actually Means
The word shun describes the period when a particular ingredient is at the peak of its flavor, nutrition, and quality. Shun refers to the period when ingredients are at their most delicious, most nutritious, and most reasonably priced. The alignment of all three — taste, health, and value — is not coincidental. It reflects the way Japanese food culture has always thought about seasonality: not as a marketing concept, but as a natural fact.
The origins of the character itself are instructive. In the traditional lunisolar calendar, a year was divided into twelve months, each further split into three periods — early, middle, and late. The word shun originally represented one such unit of time, and came to mean a regular, natural cycle. Over centuries, its meaning narrowed from calendar unit to culinary concept — but the sense of cyclical inevitability remained. Shun is not a trend. It is a rhythm.
In Japanese cuisine, seasonality means taking advantage of the “fruit of the mountains” — yama no sachi — as well as the “fruit of the sea” — umi no sachi — as they come into season. The phrase yama no sachi encompasses the bamboo shoots of spring, the chestnuts of autumn, the mountain vegetables that appear briefly after the snows recede. Umi no sachi includes the bonito that arrives with the Kuroshio Current each spring, the sweet shrimp of winter, the sea urchin whose quality shifts week by week through the summer months. Together, they constitute a vast seasonal calendar of ingredients, each with its own moment of arrival and departure.
A Calendar of Seventy-Two Seasons
To understand how seriously Japan has taken the measurement of seasonal change, consider the structure of its traditional calendar. Japan’s year was traditionally divided into twenty-four sekki — solar terms — based on the sun’s movements. One year is first marked by the winter and summer solstices and the autumn and spring equinoxes. Between these are four divisions marking the start of each season. The eight segments are divided into three parts, each named after seasonal characteristics, creating twenty-four periods of about fifteen days each.
The twenty-four solar terms system has deep roots in ancient China’s Yellow River agricultural zones, where predicting and reading seasonal changes was vital to securing food. Japan’s oldest historical record, Nihon Shoki (720 AD), states that Chinese calendrical knowledge was introduced via the Korean peninsula around the sixth century, and the twenty-four solar terms were soon incorporated into Japanese life.
But Japan did not stop at twenty-four. In 1685, court astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the system, rewriting the names to better match the local climate and nature of Japan. Each of the twenty-four solar terms was divided into three sets of five days, creating seventy-two microseasons — called kō — each associated with traditional customs, foods, festivals, and natural observations.
The names of these microseasons read like a poetry of observation. “Bush warblers begin to sing.” “The first peach blossoms open.” “Deer shed their antlers.” “Cold sets in.” Each marks a specific five-day window in the year, a precisely named moment of transition that the traditional Japanese calendar insisted on recording. This is not poetic licence. It is the accumulated attention of centuries of people watching nature carefully enough to notice that things happen in a particular order, at a particular time, and that the food available is part of that order.
Three Stages Within a Season
Even within the concept of shun, Japanese food culture makes finer distinctions. The season of shun is divided into three periods. Hashiri refers to the starting period, when seasonal foods are first sold on the market — early arrivals that are especially fresh. Sakari is the middle period, when foods are ripe, readily available, and reasonably priced. Nagori is the final period, in which seasonal foods slowly start to disappear from markets and the process of welcoming a new season begins.
These three phases teach a specific relationship to food: not just what to eat, but how the same ingredient changes, and what those changes call for in the kitchen. A matsutake mushroom at hashiri is thin and aromatic; at nagori it is fully opened with stronger but earthier character. The cook adjusts accordingly.
The emotional register of each stage matters as much as the culinary one. Hashiri carries the excitement of return — the first bamboo shoot after winter, the first young bonito of spring, prized and celebrated precisely because it is the first. These first foods during the hashiri period are called hatsumono, and have long been rumored to bring good luck and prolong one’s life by seventy-five days. Whether or not one believes in the superstition, it speaks to the cultural weight attached to the seasonal debut of an ingredient.
Nagori, by contrast, carries something like melancholy. When speaking of nagori, one must also speak of the human relationship to the passage of time — the timelines that govern us, some of them linear and others cyclical. To eat a late-season ingredient is to acknowledge that it will soon be gone, that the season is ending, and that next year’s return is months away. This emotional dimension — the awareness of impermanence built into the act of eating — is distinctly Japanese, and distinctly connected to the philosophy of mono no aware: the bittersweet recognition of transience as an inherent quality of beautiful things.
How the Calendar Shapes the Table
In practice, the twenty-four solar terms and the concept of shun together create a remarkably precise seasonal rhythm for Japanese cooking. These terms not only denote climatic changes but also influence cultural events, festivals, and culinary practices in Japan. The arrival of Risshun — the beginning of spring, around February 4th — signals the start of the new agricultural year, and with it the appearance of spring vegetables in markets. Kokuu, the “grain rain” of late April, marks a period when warmer temperatures and spring rains produce ideal growing conditions for tea. The harvest period of autumn is governed by multiple terms in close succession, each marking a different stage of the ripening of rice, mushrooms, root vegetables, and seafood fattening for winter.
Traditional Japanese restaurants — particularly those serving kaiseki, the formal multi-course cuisine associated with Kyoto — track these transitions closely. A kaiseki menu changes not just with the four seasons but with the solar terms, and sometimes with the microseasons within them. The appearance of a particular ingredient on the menu is a statement about time: this is what is happening right now, in the fields and the sea, and we are reflecting that moment in what we serve you today. The menu is a kind of seasonal journalism.
Home cooking follows the same logic, if less formally. Japanese supermarkets display seasonal produce prominently, often with signage noting that an ingredient is “now in shun.” Fish counters change their offerings week by week. The question a Japanese home cook might ask — not “what do I feel like eating?” but “what is good right now?” — encodes the philosophy of shun into the most ordinary domestic act.
The Nutritional Argument
Shun is not only an aesthetic philosophy. In-season foods are optimized for the climate and environment of the season and are at their peak nutritional value and flavor. Eating seasonal foods is often said to be one of the secrets behind the long life expectancy of the Japanese people. For example, vegetables harvested in summer often have cooling properties, while root vegetables that come into season in winter help warm and strengthen the body.
This intuition — that the body needs different things at different times of year, and that seasonal food provides them — predates modern nutritional science by many centuries. It belongs to a pre-modern understanding of the relationship between human bodies and natural cycles that is also found in traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic practice. Whether or not one accepts the full framework, the underlying observation is empirically sound: food consumed at its peak of ripeness does tend to have higher concentrations of vitamins, minerals, and flavor compounds than food grown out of season or transported over long distances.
Shun in a World Without Seasons
Modern food systems have largely dissolved the practical necessity of seasonal eating. In most wealthy countries, strawberries are available in December, asparagus in October, and any fish species can be sourced year-round through global supply chains and aquaculture. Japan is not exempt from this development. The supermarkets of Tokyo stock tomatoes and cucumbers in winter, and the concept of shun has become, for many consumers, more aspirational than operative.
And yet shun persists — as a concept, as a value, as a way of thinking about food that continues to shape Japanese culinary culture at every level from the home kitchen to the three-Michelin-star restaurant. It persists because it encodes something true: that food has a natural time, and that eating it at that time is a different experience than eating it at any other. Not merely fresher, or more nutritious, but more connected — to the place where it grew, to the season in which it ripened, to the larger cycles of which any single meal is a small but real part.
To eat with an awareness of shun is to eat with an awareness of time. And that, in the end, is what Japanese food culture has always been asking us to do.
This article is part of Waden’s Seasons series — following the rhythm of the Japanese culinary year through its twenty-four solar terms and beyond. Read more at waden.umamibako.com.
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