"Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts" by Haruo Shirane -
"Spring and autumn in Japan are relatively mild, very similar to these seasons in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, but climatically they are sandwiched between two long and severe seasons. Although summer ends around August 6 under the modern calendar, in terms of climatic conditions, summer in Kyoto continues at least until the end of August. When the monsoon and post-monsoon periods are combined with the hot weather of August, summer lasts for roughly one-third of the year. Viewed in this larger perspective, spring and autumn are transitional seasons between the cold continental weather and the hot Pacific Ocean weather.15 These severe climatic conditions contrast starkly with the widely held view of Japan’s climate as mild, elegant, and harmonious. In an inversion of the actual climatic conditions, Nara- and Heian-period aristocratic culture made spring and autumn the supreme seasons, which were celebrated in literature and the visual arts, as they were in early China, and around which a wide range of religious, social, and cultural associations developed. This disjunction between the actual climate and the poetic culture of the four seasons can be traced to several factors. First, the location of ancient (before 784) and Heian Japanese culture was in the Nara and Kyoto basins, where the winter was relatively mild compared with that in other parts of the country. The view of “nature” found in waka and in Japanese classics such as the Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari, ca. 947), and The Tale of Genji reflects almost entirely the conditions in these two inland basins. As a result, the winter depicted in classical Japanese literature is mild, with gently falling snow, which, as a harbinger of a rich harvest, was regarded as auspicious. In the rest of Honshu, particularly on the Japan Sea side and in the northeast, snow was considered a serious hardship and a hazard. The severe snows of the area facing the Japan Sea, the so-called Snow Country, do not figure in classical literature and poetry. It was not until the emergence of haikai (popular linked verse) by poets like Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), a peasant from the Shinshū (Nagano Prefecture) area, in the early nineteenth century, that heavy snow appears in poetry. Second, summer in early and medieval Kyoto was in reality a time of extreme heat, pestilence, and death. The result was a large number of local and major festivals in the capital (such as the Gion Festival and the Hollyhock [Aoi] Festival) and in the provinces intended to appease the gods and to exorcise sin and dangerous elements. For example, the famous Gion Festival in Kyoto, which was held in the first half of the Sixth Month in the premodern period, at the beginning of the post-monsoon season and at the height of summer heat, originated in the mid-Heian period as a prayer to the god of the Gion Shrine for protection from pestilence and natural disasters. These negative aspects of summer were not considered the proper subject matter for classical poetry and generally do not appear in waka, particularly those of the imperial waka anthologies, which were intended to manifest the harmony of the state and the cosmos. Court poetry of the Heian period thus did not reflect the actual climate so much as create a highly aestheticized and, as we shall see, ideological representation of the four seasons. Imperial waka anthologies, such as the Kokinshū, selected the most appealing aspects of the seasons as they conformed to aristocratic standards and for which there was often a Chinese literary precedent. The heavy weight placed on spring and autumn (two books each) and the brief representation of summer and winter (one short book each) in the Kokinshū thus reflect a utopian view of nature. Finally, when it came to the unpleasant or difficult seasons, summer and winter, aristocratic poetry and culture sought to depict not what nature was actually like but what it ought to be. For example, one of the most important summer topics in Japanese poetry (waka, renga [classical linked verse], and haikai) was summer night (natsu no yo), which was thought to bring coolness and relief from the heat and was deemed to be all too short. In the Edo period, a hokku (opening verse of a renga sequence) that suggested a cool residence was considered to be complimentary to the host. Japanese traditional confectionary and cakes (wagashi), ikebana, the tea ceremony, rock-and-sand gardens, and the architecture of palace-style (shinden-zukuri) and parlor-style (skoin-zukuri) residences are all designed to give a feeling of coolness, precisely because the summer is so hot and humid in central Japan. As Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) notes in Nanbōroku (Records of the Words of Rikyū, 1593) in regard to the tea ceremony, “In summer impart a sense of coolness, in winter a feeling of warmth.”16 In other words, one of the functions of secondary nature in the capital was to create an ideal environment through linguistic, visual, tactile, and alimentary means."