Japan celebrates the month of June with a charming plum shower – a month-long rainy season that humidifies the land of Rising Sun. The season is to some non-Japanese detestable as it keeps on raining for days on end to discourage your outings, while the Japanese detect immense pleasure therein, tactfully calling it Tsuyu, a season of Plum Shower, appreciating plum trees bathing in the watery air throughout the month to ripen the fruits.

Plum and cherry trees are two traditional flowering trees that characterizes this country and have long offered ingredients for arts – poety, literature, ant you name it. Plum precedes cherry in foretelling the arrival of Spring each with its own blossoms: plum with a tranquil world of elegant ivory and cherry with an expansive sea of gorgeous pink.

Plum shower is Nature’s blessing. It showers in the orchards to produce the fruits, in the paddies to prompt rice to grow, and in the botanical gardens to flower hydrangeas. Tourists dare pick mildly rainy June days to visit Kamakura’s Meigetuin, or commonly known as Ajisai (hydrangeas) Temple, just for a moment of stroll through the sea of hydrangeas in full bloom.

Plum shower is a prelude to Japan’s notorious humid summer which is really Nature’s deliberate choice of heat and humidity to sustain Japan’s natural blessings for its people to live with throughout the year. Seasonal diversities so typical of Japan owe much of the charms to plum shower.

Strange as it may seem to the outsiders, we Japanese do not detest humid summer but rather opt to innovate various means to live with it – not to mention an airy kimono known as Yutata to wear on sticky days, outdoor festivities with the fireflies hopping over the brooks. We stage festivals more often in summertime to prelude thansgiving rituals deep in the autumn.

Plum shower thus brings ife to things Japanese; it motivates in many ways the Japanese way of thinking. Plum shower brings home just such portion of humidity as Nature requires to run this rich land of four seasons – Japan.

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