A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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tōji
Tōji is the winter solstice in the Japanese calendar, falling around December 21, and it is one of the twenty-four seasonal markers dividing the traditional year. It is the shortest day and the turning point, and the customs attached to it are about heat and light: a bath with yuzu fruit floating in it, and a dish of pumpkin, both held to carry a person through the cold to come.
Etymology
The word means, roughly, the arrival of winter’s extreme, and its counterpart at midsummer is geshi. This lexicon also carries daikan, great cold, and shunbun, the spring equinox, from the same system, which came from China and names its markers in flat agricultural terms.
Notes
In the traditional scheme, the solstice is the middle of winter rather than its start, since winter begins at rittō in early November. The yuzu bath is said to keep colds away for the year and the pumpkin to protect against illness, and both are still widely observed, with public baths advertising the yuzu and supermarkets stacking squash for the date.