Autumn Begins When the Steamed Buns Come Back

What's going on

Japanese literature has a formal system for keeping track of the seasons. A saijiki is an almanac of seasonal words — kigo — that poets draw on when writing haiku, with every entry filed under spring, summer, autumn or winter. Cherry blossoms are spring. Pacific saury is autumn. The categories are old, codified, and taken reasonably seriously.

So when one person announced that convenience stores had started stocking steamed pork buns again and that autumn had therefore begun, they filed it under a fat person's almanac and apologized for it. The joke works because it isn't entirely a joke. The chains do rotate their hot-food counters on a fixed annual schedule — buns in late summer, oden stew a month or so later — and that schedule tracks the calendar far more reliably than the weather does, which in Japan is still somewhere around 35°C at the beginning of September.

What followed wasn't a pile-on so much as a survey. Everyone had their own version: the beer aisle, the cake shop window, the free coffee at Kaldi switching from iced to hot. A folk almanac, assembled in an afternoon.