Around February 4th each year, the Japanese calendar marks 立春, Risshun — the beginning of spring. Not the arrival of warm weather. The naming of spring.

The distinction matters. On 立春, it is almost certainly still cold. In many parts of Japan, the coldest weeks of winter fall right around this date. What changes is not the temperature but the designation — the acknowledgment, made official by the old solar calendar, that the season has turned on its axis. Winter is named as past. Spring is named as begun. The weather will catch up eventually.

The twenty-four solar terms

立春 is part of 二十四節気, nijūshi sekki — the twenty-four solar terms, a system that divides the year into twenty-four segments based on the sun's position in the sky. The system came to Japan from China, where it had been used for agriculture and calendrical purposes for over two thousand years. Each term marks a specific point in the sun's annual cycle and carries a name that describes what is happening in the natural world at that moment.

立春 — spring stands up. 雨水, the rains begin to soften. 啓蟄, insects wake from the ground. 春分, the equinox. The terms are precise, observational, and poetic all at once. They describe a world being watched closely and named carefully.

節分 — the night before

The day before 立春 is 節分, Setsubun — the seasonal division, the last day of winter by the old calendar. 節分 is the more familiar holiday: the evening when families throw dried soybeans out of the door and shout 鬼は外、福は内, oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi — demons out, good fortune in. The beans drive out whatever bad has accumulated through the winter. The next morning is 立春, and spring begins clean.

The sequence gives 立春 a particular quality. It arrives after a night of exorcism, after something has been formally expelled. Spring doesn't just start — it starts fresh.

蝋梅 in the cold

The flower most associated with this time of year is 蝋梅, rōbai — wintersweet. It blooms in January and February, before almost anything else, when the ground is still hard and the air is still sharp. The flowers are small and yellow and waxy — rō means wax — and they have a fragrance that is surprisingly strong for such a modest flower. You can smell a wintersweet tree before you see it.

蝋梅 blooms precisely in the cold because it has to — it flowers before it leafs, opening while the branches are still bare, giving itself full sun exposure before any competition arrives. The cold is not what it endures. The cold is when it chooses to bloom.

There is something in that worth noticing. Not resilience in spite of conditions, but timing that uses the conditions. 立春 names spring while it is still winter. The 蝋梅 blooms before warmth arrives. Both are announcing something that is not yet fully here — and both are usually right.