Ozu and the Seasons

Six of Yasujiro Ozu's movies have titles that directly allude to seasons:

Early Spring (早春, 1956)
Late Spring (晩春, 1949)
Early Summer (麥秋, 1951; I think the title literally refers to the time of wheat or barley harvest)
The End of Summer (小早川家の秋, 1961; literally, The Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family)
An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味; 1962; literally, The Taste of Autumn Swordfish, which apparently is a type of macquerel)
Late Autumn (秋日和, 1969; literally, The Calm of an Autumn Day)

There is also the movie titled in translation Equinox Flower (彼岸花, 1958). The higanbana of the Japanese title is Lycoris radiata, the spider lily, which flowers in autumn, and is associated in Japan with funerals, and with meeting people you will not see again. Higan is a Buddhist festival which takes place twice a year, in spring and autumn, so I am not completely sure if this counts as a season word.

Overall, there is a lot of autumn, but maybe not as much as you would expect, considering that the recurring theme in Ozu's films is aging parents finally separating from their children, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly.

Ozu, in my view, is one of the greatest film directors of all times, and probably the one I have watched the most (not counting John Ford and John Huston, whose westerns used to run again and again on television when I lived with my parents). Both visually and emotionally, there are few directors I enjoy more. Wim Wenders probably would agree; a lot of his Tokyo documentary, Tokyo-ga, is devoted to him. In that film, Wenders goes on a pilgrimage to Ozu's grave in Kamakura, and so did I, a few years ago:

 

The sign mu, engraved on Ozu's tombstone.

Kamakura, Japan.



Rain Water

Today, February 19th, is the first day of the Rain Water (in Mandarin, yǔshuǐ) solar term.

雨水

It is an intriguing name. I guess is suggests the change from snow to rain as we move towards spring.

 

 

On a related note, I saw the first Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) flowers of the year. It was a sunny day, a bit on the cold side by our standards, but nothing compared to Chicago, where the temperature is -9 C, or Beijing, where it is -3 C.

Late Winter

It occurred to me yesterday that the way we talk about the time of the year is very much biased in favor of the warm seasons: we talk of  February-March as early spring, not late winter, and October is late summer, not early autumn.

I have begun to see flowers. Some plums have been blooming for over two weeks, and I saw (and smelled) witch-hazels (Hamamelis sp.) last week. I have not seen any Forsythia flowers yet, although I have a memory of them as being the earliest ones we used to get.

At the same time, it does not feel like spring yet. It is fairly cold, and frequently wet. Most of all, when the sun does come out, it feels like winter sun. It is a fool's errand to try and put into words what I mean by that. I will instead notice that the quality of the light is what gives late summer, too, its distinctive feeling. Winter sun makes one want to find a place in the lee so one can bask. That never happens in full summer (except, maybe, to mad dogs and Englishmen).

Witch-hazel

Start of Spring and February

Tomorrow, February 4th, is the first day of the Start of Spring (in Mandarin, lìchūn) solar term.

立春

Obviously, this term represents the beginning of spring from a meteorological point of view, not an astronomical one; there will a "spring equinox" term later in the year.

Even thinking about the weather, this is somewhat optimistic, since we are just at the beginning of February, a month associated with great cold in the sculpture of the Romanesque churches of Europe:

February

Autun Cathedral, France
12th century

While the other months are usually represented by agricultural activities, February is the "dead of winter": the right thing to do is to sit indoors by the fire. And yet, here in the Pacific Northwest, the first blossoms appear on some plum trees in this month.

By the way, the Chinese term spring causes some confusion. Chinese New Year  does not arrive for another week, and it moves from year to year because the Chinese calendar is lunisolar; it can very well fall outside of the Start of Spring solar term. The Chinese name is 春节, chūnjie, literally Spring Festival, so the character for spring appears in all sorts of expressions and signs related to new year