This website displays the current phase of the 72 microseasons (kō) of Japan, each lasting five days. Also called 72 pentads, they originated in China and were adapted to better match the seasonality of Japan in the Edo period. The current version is from the abbreviated traditional calendar of 1874.

The bottom center of the screen displays the Japanese kō. Descriptions of each from the Wikipedia entry were converted to English via Google Translate, and then further edited. Additional language versions are based on Google-translated results of the edited English phrases. Please make a comment on this spreadsheet if you’d like to contribute better translations.

This text was chosen by Laurel Schwulst.

Each sound loop was composed by taking the entire corpus of the kanji used in the names of the 72 microseasons, sorting them into categories (i.e. crops, flowers, birds, weather), and then assigning each category a particular instrument. Each microseason, which has a name 3-4 kanji long, thus corresponds with a loop that consists of 3 or 4 layers. Each loop is a little more than 5 seconds, so that if one were to listen to the entire year, it would take 365 seconds.

The sounds were composed by Tiger Dingsun.

This website features Pentameter, an expressive monospace variable typeface available in 47 different languages. Pentameter’s axes vary across width (wdth: 75–125), weight (wght: 100–700) and slant (slnt: -16–0). Each microseason is set to a weight that corresponds to the season’s temperature, ranging from the minimum of 100 for the coldest days of the year, to the maximum of 700 for the hottest days (with a consistent width of 100 and slant of -10.)

As a typeface that celebrates the creative agency of hand-coding, Pentameter draws from the spirit of handwriting as an “upright italic.” Its off-beat, syncopated rhythm merges rigid monolinear mechanics with exaggerated stroke endings. You can read more about the design process of Pentameter, view a PDF Specimen or font details, and license it at Type Network.

Pentameter is released by Occupant Fonts and designed by Marie Otsuka. The Japanese characters are set in Morisawa’s Cinema Letter.

This website, pentad.world, or “Seasons in Pentameter” explores the relationship between changing seasonality, poetry, and sound. You can read more about this project on Laurel’s website.

This website was orchestrated by Laurel Schwulst. The site displays a variable typeface “Pentameter,” designed by Marie Otsuka — who also developed the website. The sounds were composed by Tiger Dingsun. Laurel, Marie, and Tiger designed the website together.