The Wheel of the Year: What Japan Taught Me About Nature and Wellbeing

A blog post for Brookes Therapies, linked from Unwound: The Autumn Edition   

In the West, we can have strawberries in December. They've usually travelled a long way to get to us, grown somewhere under glass, picked before they were ready, and none the worse for wear by the time they land on a supermarket shelf. There's also the small matter of the air miles, and the fact that a January strawberry never tastes quite like a June one. We've become very good at ignoring the seasons, and it hasn't obviously made us any happier.   

Japan does things differently. The whole year has a rhythm that Western life has mostly lost: you eat what the season gives you, because it's the season, not because it happens to be in stock. Persimmons arrive in autumn, glowing orange and sweet. A particular kind of strawberry means summer has properly started. There's even a season for eel—not to everyone's taste, mine included, but eaten anyway, because that's what the calendar asks for.   

Citrus has its own moment too: yuzu ripens through autumn and into winter, its bright, sherbety scent turning up everywhere once the weather cools, from the kitchen to the bathhouse. None of this is about virtue or effort. It's simply how the year is lived, and it adds up to a quiet, built-in sustainability no amount of Western wellness marketing quite manages to bottle.   

Participating in Nature

Nature isn't scenery in Japan. It's participated in. Every spring, the whole country watches the cherry blossom, the sakura, arrive and pass, with real tenderness in how briefly it lasts.   

In autumn comes koyo, the turning of the leaves, tracked on the evening news like a weather front until winter finally catches up with it. People go out for it, picnic under it, and plan whole weekends around it.   

In summer there are the matsuri, the street festivals, with paper lanterns, taiko drums, and food eaten standing up because sitting down would somehow miss the point. Nobody needs a reason for any of this. The season is the reason, and it's exactly this instinct—marking the year by what nature is doing rather than what the calendar says—that our new autumn rituals are built around.   

Foraging trips are a genuinely everyday part of Japanese life, not staged for visitors, simply what people already do together. I was lucky enough to be folded into plenty of them: a day gathering warabi (tender young fern shoots), then cooking what we'd found over dashi with katsuobushi shaved on top. It's the same unhurried, communal way of marking a season that runs right through Japanese culture, from grand festivals down to a quiet afternoon with a basket. I said yes to almost everything in my first couple of years there—wonderful but occasionally exhausting—and it took until my third year to properly learn how to say no. That turned out to matter almost as much as all the saying yes.   

Forest Bathing & The Scent of Hinoki

Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) is treated in Japan as a very ordinary feature of wellbeing through nature, enjoyed by all ages, not a retreat you book or a concept you learn. Part of what makes a Japanese forest so calming is its scent: hinoki (the cypress that grows right across the country) has a warm, woody fragrance said to lower stress and settle the nervous system simply by breathing it in, which is likely why it became the wood of choice for temples, traditional baths, and quiet spaces of every kind.   

My own clearest memory of that stillness needs no explanation at all: lying on the ground in a bamboo grove, looking straight up at stalks so bright green they seemed almost unreasonable, impossibly tall, swaying gently against the sky. A photograph never captures it. The point was being underneath it, not looking at it.   

Bathing Culture & The Winter Solstice   

Bathing culture runs just as deep, and this is where hinoki and yuzu properly meet. Onsen bathing itself, neck-deep in scalding water outdoors with snow falling around your shoulders, is typically taken in hinoki-lined baths, washed beforehand with hinoki stools and pails, the warmth releasing that same grounding cedar scent into the steam.   

At the winter solstice there's a lovely tradition called yuzu-yu: whole yuzu fruits floated in the bath, filling the room with their bright citrus aroma, said to ward off illness and bring good luck for the year ahead. I was lucky enough to experience proper onsen bathing at Senami Onsen in Niigata, and I still miss it more than I can easily explain. These days I make do with a British bath, long rather than deep but still its own small joy, especially with a little hinoki and yuzu oil in the water: the same pairing, warm and woody meeting bright and sunny, that calmed and comforted people through Japanese winters long before anyone called it wellness.   

That pairing is exactly why hinoki and yuzu sit at the heart of Komorebi and Momiji, our two new autumn rituals. It isn't a theme borrowed for the season. It's a genuine piece of Japanese wellbeing tradition, the same aromas used for centuries to help people slow down and feel properly, deliberately still, brought into the treatment room so you can feel it too.   

Komorebi and Momiji, our two new Japanese-inspired autumn rituals, are available at Brookes Therapies until 31 December. Book your autumn ritual here