A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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daikan
Daikan is the coldest stretch of the Japanese year, running roughly from January 20 to early February. It is the last of the twenty-four seasonal markers that divide the traditional calendar, and the one immediately before the start of spring. The name is a forecast and a description at once: This is when the cold is expected to bottom out, and the calendar says so in advance.
Etymology
The word means great cold in Japanese, and it belongs to a set of twenty-four terms that split the solar year into two-week segments. The system came from China and the names are literal and agricultural: insects waking, grain rain, small heat, great heat, frost descending, small snow, great snow. Japan later subdivided each of the twenty-four into three, giving seventy-two micro-seasons of about five days each, with names like east wind melts the ice and bear retreats to den.
Notes
Daikan is when miso, sake, and soy sauce are traditionally brewed, because the cold slows fermentation and keeps unwanted organisms down, and water drawn during it is said to keep longest. Cold-weather martial arts training held in this window is called kangeiko. The marker that follows daikan is risshun, the beginning of spring, which falls in the first week of February whether or not anything has thawed.