Micro-season 25 of 72 · May 6 – May 10
Frogs start calling.
Kawazu hajimete naku
The first frog calls break the evening stillness, announcing that summer has truly begun in the paddies and wetlands.
After nightfall, a single voice rises from the flooded rice field — tentative, then answered by another, and another, until the darkness pulses with song. The air carries the mineral scent of wet earth and young rice shoots. This is the threshold moment: winter's silence has lifted, and the land remembers its ancient chorus.
Nature notes
Japanese tree frogs emerge from their hiding places to begin their mating calls, their high keening threading through the dusk. Rice paddies, newly flooded for planting, become mirrors reflecting the last light of day. Swallows dip low over the water's surface, hunting the insects that now swarm in the warming evenings.
In season
Fruits
Vegetables
Fish
At the table
Rice simmered with tender bamboo shoots captures the last sweetness of spring's most prized vegetable before the season turns.
Seared bonito, barely touched by flame, arrives with the first strong catch of the season — its iron-red flesh a taste of the warming Kuroshio current.
Cultural note
Early May brings the final days of Golden Week, when families return to ancestral villages and the countryside swells briefly with visitors. In farming communities, this is also the critical window for rice planting — taue — a practice still marked in some regions with ritual offerings to ensure a good harvest. The frog's voice has long been heard as a blessing on the water-filled fields.
田に水を引けば夜ごとの蛙かな
ta ni mizu wo / hikeba yogoto no / kawazu kana
water drawn to paddies — / and now each night belongs / to the frogs
The chorus swells and fades with the passing clouds, and in the spaces between calls, you hear the summer breathing in.