From 6 a.m. on an October morning, the narrow lanes of Tsukiji Market are already full of autumn: chestnuts heaped in baskets, matsutake mushrooms laid out in shallow wooden boxes, the first sanma of the season lined up silver on ice. Ask a vendor what is good today and the answer is usually more specific than "everything." It is what has reached its shun (旬), the short window when an ingredient is at its best, and in Japan, waiting for that window is one of the quiet pleasures of the year.
Japan even has a name for this time of year. Shokuyoku no aki (⾷欲の秋) means "autumn, the season of appetite," because so many foods peak in the same few weeks.
The character 旬 is the same one Japanese uses for a ten-day period of the month. The first, middle, and last ten days of any month are jōjun, chūjun, and gejun. It is a fitting word for something that does not last.
Japanese food culture divides that window into three parts. Hashiri, "the run," is when a food first arrives: scarce, expensive, and eaten partly for the thrill of being early. Sakari is the true peak, when the flavor is fullest and the price finally eases. Nagori, "the lingering trace," is the last of it, eaten with the knowledge that it will not come back for a year.
Autumn shows the pattern more clearly than any other season. Matsutake mushrooms peak from late September into mid-October. Chestnuts run through September and October. Sanma, the Pacific saury, a slim fish grilled whole with salt, arrives in early September. Each one has a season of a few weeks, and within it, a peak that is shorter still.
Matsutake explains why the window cannot simply be stretched. The mushroom grows only in symbiosis with the roots of living red pine trees, in forest conditions that have never been reproduced commercially. It cannot be farmed. Every matsutake sold in Japan was found by someone walking a hillside, and when the forest stops producing them for the year, there are no more.
For most of the twentieth century, Tsukiji was Tokyo's central wholesale market, the place where the city's restaurants bought their fish. The wholesale auctions moved to Toyosu, a short distance across the bay, in 2018, but Tsukiji Market lives on in its several hundred small shops selling knives, dried bonito, seaweed, pickles, tea, produce, and fish, many of them run by the same families for generations.
Walk Tsukiji Market once a month for a year and you would see the calendar move through it. The shelves change with the season, and so do the prices. A box of matsutake in its hashiri weeks costs far more than the same box at sakari. Nobody at the stalls treats this as a problem to solve. It is simply how the year goes.|
Sanma makes the point sharper. For decades it was the most ordinary autumn fish in Japan, cheap enough for any household. In recent years, catches have fallen steeply, and the fish has become something closer to a treat. When an everyday food becomes scarce, people notice how much the season meant to them. The first grilled sanma of the year is now something families mention to each other.
The market's buyers are a large part of why the habit survives. Many of Tokyo's longestablished restaurants still buy from Tsukiji and Toyosu, and they plan their menus around what has reached its shun that week.
At a traditional sushi counter in autumn, the chef may reach for sanma, or for modorigatsuo, the "returning bonito" that comes back south in autumn richer than it was in spring. At a tempura counter, autumn brings matsutake, sliced thick and fried for barely a minute so the scent stays inside, and ginkgo nuts on a pine-needle skewer. At a small neighborhood koryōriya, the kind of restaurant with a counter, a few tables, and a handwritten list of the day's dishes, the list itself is a record of the season. It is rewritten when something new arrives and when something runs out.
Kaiseki, the formal multi-course meal that grew out of the tea ceremony, carries the idea furthest. The menu follows the month, and the season shows up not only in the ingredients but in the dishes, the garnishes, and the leaves arranged beside the food. In October, that might include matsutake dobin mushi: the mushroom steamed in a small clay teapot with ginkgo nuts, mitsuba (a mild Japanese herb), chicken, and dashi, a light broth made from kelp and dried bonito. You pour the broth into a small cup, breathe in the steam, and drink it.
What these restaurants share is a refusal to fake the calendar. A chef could serve matsutake in June, imported or frozen. Most of them will not, because their regular guests come back each autumn partly to taste it again at the right time.
Japan still waits for shun, even when it does not have to
You can buy almost any ingredient at any time of year now, and that is a real achievement. Refrigerated shipping, greenhouses, and imports from the other side of the world have made strawberries in winter and tuna in summer unremarkable. Japan's own supply chain is among the most precise anywhere. Nobody has to go without.
That said, in Japan, we still embrace the week or two when an ingredient is at its best. Not because there is no alternative, but because waiting makes the year richer. Hashiri, sakari, and nagori give people a way to talk about where a food is in its year: something to anticipate, then enjoy, then miss.
There is even an old saying from the Edo period, hatsumono shichijūgo nichi: eat the first of a season's food, and you add seventy-five days to your life. Nobody takes it literally. It survives because it puts a feeling into words: the first taste of something you have waited a year for is worth celebrating. The same feeling runs through one of the best-known haiku of the period, by the poet Yamaguchi Sodō: "Green leaves for the eyes, a cuckoo in the hills, the first bonito." Three signs of early summer, and one of them is a fish.
Seen this way, shun turns the calendar into a series of small appointments. Bamboo shoots in spring. The first bonito in early summer. Sanma in September, matsutake in October. None of them is a big event. Together, they mean there is always something on the way.
You do not need to be in Tokyo to eat by shun. You need to pay attention to what is at its
peak where you live.
A year from now, the note will still be there in the corner of the page: a date, the name of
an ingredient, and something small to look forward to.
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