A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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geshi
Geshi is the summer solstice in the Japanese calendar, falling around June 21, and it is one of the twenty-four seasonal markers that divide the traditional year into two-week segments. It marks the longest day, and in Japan it usually arrives in the middle of the rainy season.
Etymology
The word means, literally, the arrival of summer’s extreme, and it is the counterpart of tōji at midwinter. The system of twenty-four markers came from China and the names are agricultural and blunt: grain rain, insects waking, small heat, great heat, frost descending, great snow. Japan later subdivided each of the twenty-four into three five-day micro-seasons with names like irises bloom and rotten grass becomes fireflies.