A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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tsukimi
Tsukimi is the Japanese practice of gathering to look at the full moon, held at the harvest moon in September and again at the following full moon in October. Rice-flour dumplings are stacked in a pyramid, pampas grass is set out, and seasonal produce is offered. It is a viewing custom in the same tradition as cherry blossom in spring and autumn leaves in November.
Etymology
The word means moon-viewing, built the same way as hanami, flower-viewing. The custom came from China in the Heian period and was originally a courtly occasion involving boats, poetry, and the moon watched by reflection in the water rather than directly, on the grounds that the reflection was the more interesting object.
Notes
Japanese tradition sees a rabbit pounding rice cakes in the markings on the moon rather than a face, and the same rabbit is read across much of East Asia. The pampas grass on the table stands in for rice stalks, since the moon festival predates the availability of the crop at that date, and the dumplings are stacked in a pyramid of fifteen for the fifteenth night of the lunar month.