A Word from the Editor

I arrived in Akita in November 2021. And after months of unusually heavy snow and recurring cloudy spring days, summer felt like the season where everything burst into life and sensation. The sun lingered for longer in the sky, festivals were frequent and crowded, the humid air was thick and clung to your skin as constant sweat, and the semi cicadas sang their mild buzz in the all-surrounding green woods.

Being from Texas and Colorado, I’m used to dry heat and erratic weather— droughts, wildfires, strong winds and sudden blizzards. The seasons aren’t so much a marker of natural change in the Western United States, as much as something to be tolerated and contended with. Unpredictable shifts leave little room for seasonal reflection.

For a country that clearly experiences all four seasons, it’s no surprise that Japanese aesthetics are heavily tied to them. You can see this expressed everywhere–in the seasonal vegetables and sweets, the various ceremonies our schools perform, and in the summer tanabata festivals, held under the stars Vega and Altair, playing out the old love story of Orihime and Hikoboshi on a bridge of magpies, temporarily meeting across the big cosmic river that is the Milky Way.

These feelings of change, transience and nostalgia are everywhere you look. There’s a reason “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is one of the most loved songs in Japan.

Japanese literature has a term for this called mono no aware, meaning empathy towards things or awareness of their impermanence.This idea generally evokes feelings of sadness at things passing, but I don’t think it has to be that way. If anything these ephemeral markers of seasons can motivate us to live with intention, to fully immerse ourselves in all sensations however fleeting, or oppressively humid, they are.

In my time as editor, I hope that The Akitan can be a valuable time capsule for all of these seasons and our experiences in Japan. No matter where you’re from, I hope that this Akitan summer you found something to truly take you home.