Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/488

476 But to return to Old Japan. Her months were real moons, not artificial periods of thirty or thirty-one days. They were numbered one, two, three, four, and so on. Only in poetry did they bear proper names, such as January, February, and the rest are in European languages. The year consisted of twelve such moons, with an intercalary one whenever New Year would otherwise have fallen a whole moon too early. This happened about once in three years. Japanese New Year took place late in our January or in the first half of February; and that, irrespective of the state of the temperature, was universally regarded as the beginning of spring. Snow or no snow, the people laid aside their wadded winter gowns. The plum-blossoms, at least, were always there to prove that spring had come; and if the nightingale was yet silent, that was not the Japanese poets fault, but the nightingale's.

Besides the four great seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, there were twenty-four minor periods (setsu) of some fifteen days each, obtained by dividing the real, or approximately real, solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days by twenty-four. These minor periods had names, such as Risshun, "Early Spring;" Kanro, "Cold Dew;" Shōkan, "Lesser Cold;" Daikan, "Greater Cold." In addition to this, years, days, and hours were all accounted as belonging to one of the signs of the zodiac (Jap. jū-ni-shi), whose order is as follows: