寒露

Two seasons ago the dew was white. Now it's cold — 寒露, the same beads on the same grass, except that touching them is unpleasant. The naming is doing something clever here: 白露 and 寒露 describe an identical event six weeks apart, and the only thing that changed is how it feels.

This is the fortnight the leaves start turning in earnest, working south from Hokkaido at a pace slow enough to be forecast on the news like weather.

狩り means *hunting* — the same word used for boar or deer. Applied to autumn leaves it means going out specifically to look at them, which Japan does at a scale that's hard to overstate: forecast maps, packed trains, temple gardens open late with the maples lit from below.

Nobody hunts anything. The word survives from when nobles would go out to gather branches, and it kept the sense of an expedition after the gathering stopped. What's left is the idea that looking at something beautiful is an *activity* — that you'd travel for it, and plan around it, and be disappointed to miss the peak by a week.

It has a spring counterpart you may already know: 花見, flower viewing, for the cherry blossom. Same instinct, opposite end of the year.

The kana

The *n* row, and every one of them behaves.

な, に, ぬ, ね, の — n + a, i, u, e, o, no surprises, no softening. After し and ち and つ you've earned a quiet row.

の is worth pausing on. It's the single most common character in written Japanese, because besides being a sound it's a word — it joins two nouns, roughly like English *of* or *'s*. You've already seen it: 虫の声, the voice **of** insects.