A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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shunbun
Shunbun is the spring equinox in the Japanese calendar, falling around March 20, and it is one of the twenty-four seasonal markers that divide the traditional year. Day and night are equal, and from here the light gains. It is a public holiday in Japan, and the week around it is higan, when families visit and clean the graves of their ancestors.
Etymology
The word means, roughly, the division of spring, and its counterpart at the other equinox is shūbun, the division of autumn. The system of twenty-four markers came from China and the names are literal and agricultural. Daikan and geshi entries are the same scheme at midwinter and midsummer.
Notes
In the traditional arrangement, the equinoxes and solstices fall in the middle of their seasons rather than at the start, so spring begins at risshun in early February and shunbun is its midpoint.