OK Ko

As we all know, there are four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. There are also several Four Seasons restaurants and Four Seasons hotels, movie and TV show. Can’t forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Northeast Philly, where rich and famous politicians go to mingle and hold weird press conferences. Even tots understand the way the year is split up, from snowman time to flower/shower time to beach time to goblin time.

But there has to be another way to look at the passage of the year. A way that celebrates the multitude of natural changes each week or so brings, in a poetic manner. Well, leave it to the Japanese! It’s called kō, and it’s a unique traditional calendar featuring not just four, but a whopping 72 micro-seasons. Each season, lasting approx. five or six days, is named and claimed for a specific natural development during that part of the year. Here are a few examples:

February 9–13 黄鶯睍睆 Kōō kenkan su.  Bush warblers start singing in the mountains

April 30–May 4 牡丹華 Botan hana saku  Peonies bloom

July 12–16 蓮始開 Hasu hajimete hiraku First lotus blossoms

I LOVE this! Though I do wonder how precise these milestones are. I mean, if on October 18-22 “crickets chirp around the door,” well, whose door? Everyone’s? And are they silent as church mice--I mean, church crickets--on October 17 and 23? I envision an annual National Cricket Chirping Tally, as thousands of earnest Japanese naturalists and poets fan out from Tokyo to Kyoto, checking all the doors for signs of chirppage. That sounds a bit unrealistic to me. Better perhaps to amend it to: “a number of crickets chirp around some doors.” There we go! Much more accurate, and we’ve drained all the poetry out of it too!

If I had a chance to come up with a seasonal calendar, which way would I go?

I could go the lazy way (always a fave way of mine) and have just two seasons: “Too hot” and “Too cold.”

Easy-peasy, but not very exciting.

Or we could increase the four to 24 seasons, to wit:

July 1-5 “Back to School!” and July 6-31 “Trick or Treat!”

December 1-23 “Send Christmas cards!” and December 24-31 “Nah, maybe next year.”

That sounds like a lot of work.

Maybe a happy medium…eight seasons, such as:

September through Mid-October: Pumpkin spice latte season

Mid-October through November: Jack O’Lantern spice latte and pie season

It’d be a boon to the folks who make those nylon flags your always-festive neighbors hoist, with snowflakes and autumn leaves on them. They’d have double their business, and keep the neighbors too busy hoisting and unhoisting to make snide comments about your drab, flagless home.

You know? I guess I don’t care that much about shaking up the system. Let our Japanese friends mark the ripening of the rice and the hiding of the rainbows.

72 is a no- kō for me. I’ll stick with the Big Four after all.