Halfway between winter and spring equinox, the plum flowers will start to blossom across Japan. The 88th day of spring marks the first day of tea leaf picking for a new season, and the leaves of this harvest fetch high prices. 210 and 220 days from the beginning of spring are pegged as days that typhoons will most likely come, causing much dismay to farmers. While it may sound like a parody, since ancient times, Japan has taken seasonal cues from the natural calendar. This is particularly evident in cuisine, meaning that if you’re in Japan during the spring months, you can look forward to a special selection of things to eat and drink.

Sansai 

sansai are often used as ingredients in shojin ryori(buddist vegetarian cuisine).

These are the wild mountain vegetables that poke their welcome heads out as soon as the snowy blankets and chill of winter start to give. Sansai are usually bitter and provide timely astringence to break down fat and toxins stockpiled through colder months. The most common types include takenoko (bamboo sprouts), taranome (Japanese angelica-tree roots), fuki (butterbur) and nanohana (rapeseed)
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Yusuke Kawai grew up just outside of Kobe in a “new town,” the Japanese term for a planned community. Kawai, who records music under the name tofubeats, describes his government-developed hometown: “There’s no city center and no local shopping streets like in other towns. Every station has similarly designed shopping malls, just with different names.” They were ideal residential zones, with big-city vice swapped out for big-box chains and department stores. Kawai recalls the only cultural center of any sort being a music shop, rental store Tsutaya and second-hand shop Hard-Off.

“The new town was made from nothing, and so we didn’t really have any traditional festivals. To me, it was vacant. The new town didn’t really have its own uniqueness in Japan.”

Yet this space helped develop Kawai’s creativity and shaped his approach to music. As a teenager, he spent most of his time absorbing the CDs available at Tsutaya and used any other free time to hunt down new sounds on the internet. “I tried to find anything interesting around me, but there were always only ordinary things. And so I started to think that I have to remix what I had to make something new.” Kawai spliced up mainstream J-pop sounds and YouTube discoveries into a fidgety style, which helped him connect with like-minded people on message boards.

Whether it’s instant ramen, selfie sticks or Walkmans, Japan provides innovative, aesthetically-pleasing solutions to everyday problems. But how do you stylishly transport groceries from the market to home, bottles of booze to a barbecue, clothes to the sento, or bento boxes to a picnic? Use a furoshiki.

Furoshiki are rectangular pieces of decorative fabric made from silk, cotton or synthetic fibers that have been used for wrapping goods in Japan for at least 1200 years, since the Nara Period. Until the onset of paper and plastic bags in the 1960s, they were an indispensable part of daily Japanese life. Furoshiki can be distinguished from their fraternal twin the tenugui—another colorfully-dyed and-patterned Japanese cloth—by the difference in use. While both may be used for wrapping, tenugui have typically been used for other instances, such as mopping sweaty brows, as washcloths, and as decorations.

There are around 10 different sizes of furoshiki, each with different applications and a myriad of wrapping techniques. When it comes to wrapping common foods, 45 to 50 cm is recommended. Other uses fare better with larger sizes. For bento boxes, 68 to 70 cm is best, and 90 cm for wrapping a bottle of booze (larger perhaps if you are kind enough to be gifting a magnum of wine or an isshobin of sake).