Japan Doesn’t Have 4 Seasons. It Has 72.

Originally published 8 September 2025. Updated November 2026.

When people talk about Japan, they love to mention the four seasons. Cherry blossoms in spring, fireworks in summer, red leaves in autumn, snow in winter. It’s true, as far as it goes.

The old calendar never stopped at four. It counted 24 solar terms, and inside them 72 small seasons, each named for something you could see or hear if you were paying attention: the first frost, the swallows coming back, the wind that takes the last leaves from the trees.

So Japan doesn’t have four seasons. It has 72, and after decades of working here, we’ve learned to plan by them.

Four seasons is how a year looks from a distance. Seventy-two is how it looks when you’re standing in it.

What Are Japan’s 72 Seasons?

The sun’s yearly path across the sky is divided into 24 equal steps of 15 degrees, and each step begins a solar term, a sekki (節気), of about fifteen days. Their names are plain and practical: Risshun, the start of spring, in early February; Shunbun, the spring equinox; Kanro, cold dew; Shōsetsu, a little snow. Each sekki is divided again into three kō (候), the micro-seasons, of about five days each.

The calendar doesn’t always agree with the weather. Autumn begins on 8 August, in the thick of the summer heat, and spring in the first week of February, when most of the country is still in its winter coat. Japan has a phrase for this, koyomi no ue de wa (暦の上では), “according to the calendar”, and every August the weather presenters use it in the same breath as a heatstroke warning.

Because the sekki follow the sun rather than the moon, their dates barely move. Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory publishes them every February for the year ahead, and they shift by a day or so from one year to the next.

The idea came from China, and its first names described a Chinese landscape. In the 1680s the astronomer Shibukawa Harumi rewrote them for Japan’s own birds, plants and weather when he made the country’s first homegrown calendar. The calendar makers revised them again in 1755, and those, with a few small changes, are the names Japan uses today. It was a farmer’s clock as much as a poet’s: grain rain, Kokuu, arrives as the rice seedbeds are sown.

Japanese Season Names: Small Things, Noticed

Read the kō in order and they become a story. In late March, sparrows start to nest, then the cherries begin to open (sakura hajimete hiraku, 桜始開), then thunder raises its voice for the first time in the year (kaminari sunawachi koe o hassu, 雷乃発声). In April the swallows return and the first rainbows appear. By late October the first frost falls, light rains come and go, and the maples and ivy turn yellow (momiji tsuta kibamu, 楓蔦黄).

None of it is grand. The calendar asks you to notice small things, a bird, a frost, a change in the air, and to accept that each will be gone within the week. It’s the same feeling Japan calls mono no aware: the beauty of things because they pass.

Poets have leaned on it for centuries. A haiku still carries a season word, a kigo, and the almanacs that collect them, the saijiki, run to thousands of entries. Kitchens keep the same clock: a kaiseki menu follows the season onto the plate, and a letter in Japanese still opens with a line about the weather of the week. Nobody calls it tradition. It’s simply how people here pay attention.

Do you know what’s flowering on your street this week?

The 72 Seasons Through a Lens

Five days doesn’t sound like much until you watch the light change across them. Between the first week of October and the end of November, Tokyo loses three quarters of an hour of evening light, and a ceremony set for the same hour in Kanro and in Shōsetsu happens in two different lights.

So we plan the week as carefully as the place. Much of what the photographs will hold is decided long before anyone lifts a camera: where the light falls at the hour of the ceremony, which way the two of you face, whether the portraits come before the dinner or after it, when the candles are lit.

When we plan a wedding in Japan, we’re planning for a particular week, in a particular light, as much as for a place.

In Kyoto’s maple forests, the week matters more than the month. In Hakuba, one night of snow can turn a green valley white.

The kō were written for the climate of central Japan, and the rest of the country runs on its own dates. The cherry kō says late March. In Nagano the trees open more than two weeks after Tokyo’s, in Sapporo, around the start of May, and in Okinawa the first blossoms come in January. In any year the forecast has the final word, which is why our cherry blossom guide plans in weeks, not dates.

What Season Were You Married In?

Couples tell us about their spring wedding or their autumn elopement. We like to ask which week.

Some of ours already know. A small wedding at Jinya fell inside sakura hajimete hiraku, the cherries begin to open. An elopement there, in another spring, landed on the very first day of the next season, when thunder raises its voice. In Yamanashi, a June elopement began on the first day of ume no mi kibamu, the plums turn yellow.

Imagine saying you married when the first rainbows appeared, or when the pheasants started to call. It’s a more exact kind of memory. We’ve worked through everything from “Thunder ceases” to “Great rains sometimes fall”, the rains often on cue, and we’ve photographed vows under cherry blossom, fireflies and typhoon skies. No two of those weeks looked alike, and neither did the couples in them.

A few couples hold on to theirs tightly. Two of ours made their micro-season the words of the whole day, on the welcome sign, the napkins and everything printed in between. Another went home and had theirs tattooed, matching: the north wind takes the leaves.

Not every kō was made for a napkin. “The cherries begin to open” looks beautiful in calligraphy; “worms surface” asks a little more of a couple. And spare a thought for anyone married in the week when rotten grass becomes fireflies, which, to be fair, is lovelier than it sounds.

So, when did you get married?

Why Japan’s Micro-Seasons Matter to Us

Our work depends on presence, and nothing teaches it like these small seasons. They’re why we notice the camellias opening outside a coffee shop in November, the sudden chorus of cicadas in July, the rainbow that turns up after far too much rain. It’s a way of seeing. In our work, seeing is everything.

Four seasons will tell you roughly when you were married. Seventy-two will tell you what it felt like.

All 72 Micro-Seasons: Japan’s Calendar for 2027

Here is the whole year, from the first week of January, with each micro-season’s 2027 dates, its Japanese name and reading, and what it means. The wheel shows the same year at a glance, starting where the old calendar starts, at Risshun in February.

If you’re choosing between them, our guide to the best time of year for a wedding in Japan weighs the seasons against each other, and how to choose the date itself takes it from there. When we plan a wedding in Japan, this is where the conversation starts.

Updated November 2026. Sources: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, 2027 calendar: the 24 solar terms and Tokyo sunrise and sunset; Koyomi Wiki, the 72 micro-seasons; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, monthly statistics for wedding ceremony services.