A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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tsuyu
Tsuyu is the East Asian rainy season, running through Japan from roughly early June to mid-July, when a stationary front sits across the country and brings weeks of humid overcast and persistent rain. It moves north up the archipelago over several weeks, arriving in Okinawa in May and reaching northern Honshu in late June, and its beginning and end are declared regionally by the weather agency.
Etymology
The name is written with the characters for plum and rain, because the season coincides with the ripening of the plums, and the same term is used in Chinese and Korean.
Notes
The front forms where a cold air mass to the north meets a warm humid one from the Pacific and neither can displace the other, which is why it stalls. The season is essential to the rice crop and to the water supply, and it is also the traditional time for making plum preserves and plum wine. Hydrangeas flower throughout and are the plant most associated with it.