Micro-seasons · 七十二候
Japan named 72 seasons. In 2021 it stopped officially watching most of them.
For over a thousand years the Japanese almanac has split the year into 72 kō — five-day seasons, each with a poetic name and its own words. The Meteorological Agency tracked many of the phenomena they name. Then, in 2021, it discontinued 94% of those observations. Here are all 72 — and the few the climate has measurably moved.
- 春 Spring
- 夏 Summer
- 秋 Autumn
- 冬 Winter
- — solid still observed · dashed dropped 2021 · faint never observed
- earlier later
All 72 — pick one
No. 29 · 夏至 げし · Summer
菖蒲華ayame hana saku
Irises bloom
Never instrumentally observed
紫の菖蒲が咲きます。
Purple irises bloom.
- 菖蒲ayameiris
- 紫murasakipurple
- 花hanaflower
What micro-season were you born in?
Pick any date — a birthday, an anniversary — to find its kō, its words, and whether the climate has nudged it.
How to read the wheel
- Each of the 72 segments is one kō, tinted by its season around the ring.
- A solid edge means Japan still observes the phenomenon; dashed means it was dropped in the 2021 cut; faint means it was never instrumentally watched.
- A coloured dot marks the 10 kō with a real measured shift — green for earlier, orange for later.
- The highlighted segment is today’s kō, the one we’re living in right now.
The drift that remains
The phenomena still on record — the surviving plants plus the long animal series frozen at the 2021 cut — are moving, but only a few clearly, and not all the same way. Some now arrive earlier, others later; many are too short or too noisy a record to read with confidence. Open any kō and “see the data” to judge the fit yourself.
By JMA records, the maples of 楓蔦黄 now turn yellow about 19.7 days later than they did in 1953. Cherry blossom, meanwhile, keeps creeping earlier.
Sources & method
Calendar: the Japanese 本朝七十二候 (NAOJ 暦計算室). Phenology and the 2021 cut: the Japan Meteorological Agency’s 生物季節観測 累年値 (Doi et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2021). Each drift figure is the slope of a pooled per-station anomaly regression — each station’s date minus its own 1953– mean, across every station-year — so the trend a kō shows is exactly the number cited; open any mapped kō to see its scatter and R². Kō without an authoritative series are shown as structure only — never an invented number.
Download all 72 kō as CSV ↓This map is made by the people behind JIVX, which turns a fascination with Japan into the language itself — short daily sentences, graded the way a teacher would, not flashcards.
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