Seasons of soup: a year of bowls in Japan

Japanese cooking has a word every visitor should learn early: shun (旬), the moment when an ingredient is at its peak. Menus change with it, shop signs change with it, and soup changes with it most of all. The same street can smell of simmering daikon in January and of chilled sesame dressing in July.

If you're planning a trip, it's worth knowing what the season has in store. Here's a year of bowls, starting where soup feels most at home.

Winter: steam on the windows

Winter is soup's high season. The great comfort of the cold months is oden (おでん), a slow-simmered pot of daikon radish, boiled eggs, fish cakes, konnyaku and more, all sitting in a light dashi until they're soaked through. You'll find it at specialist restaurants, at food stalls and, in the colder months, steaming in trays beside the till at convenience stores. Our guide to oden covers what to pick.

Then there's nabe (鍋), the hot pot cooked at the table. Vegetables, tofu, fish or meat go into a shared pot of broth, and everyone helps themselves as things cook. To my mind, the best part comes at the end, when rice or noodles go into the broth that's left, richer now for everything that has passed through it.

Winter is also when miso ramen makes the most sense, the style made famous by snowy Sapporo. Thick, curly noodles in a broth deepened with miso are about as warming as food gets.

New Year: one bowl to end the year, one to begin

On New Year's Eve, Ōmisoka (大晦日), many households eat toshikoshi soba (年越しそば), "year-crossing noodles". The explanations vary: long noodles for a long life, or buckwheat noodles that bite through easily, cutting away the troubles of the old year. Whatever the reason, it's a quiet, simple bowl. Read more in our piece on toshikoshi soba.

A day later comes ozōni (お雑煮), the soup of New Year's morning, with mochi rice cakes at its heart. Here, the rule is that there is no rule: ozōni changes from region to region and from family to family. Broadly speaking, the Kantō region around Tokyo leans towards a clear broth with square, grilled mochi, while the Kyoto area is known for white miso and round mochi. Our ozōni guide explores the variations.

Spring: shoots and shells

Spring brings takenoko (筍), fresh bamboo shoots, pale and tender with a faint sweetness. A classic pairing is wakatake-ni (若竹煮), bamboo shoots simmered in dashi with wakame seaweed, a dish that tastes of the season's first green.

It's also clam season. Little asari (あさり) clams are at their best in spring, and asari miso soup, with the shells opening into the broth, is one of the season's small pleasures. Around Hinamatsuri, the Doll Festival on 3 March, many families serve ushiojiru (潮汁), a clear soup that is often made with hamaguri clams. The reason usually given is that the two halves of a hamaguri shell fit only each other, which makes the clam a symbol of a good match.

Summer: noodles on ice

When the heat and humidity arrive, Japan doesn't stop eating noodles. It just cools them down.

Ramen shops announce the change with a famous kind of sign, hiyashi chūka hajimemashita (冷やし中華はじめました), "we've started cold ramen". Hiyashi chūka (冷やし中華) is chilled ramen noodles piled with strips of cucumber, ham, thin omelette and tomato, dressed with a tangy soy-and-vinegar sauce or a sesame one. It isn't technically soup, but I'll allow it.

Then there's sōmen (素麺), thin white wheat noodles served ice-cold with a dipping sauce. They're the taste of a Japanese summer, light enough to eat on the hottest day. For a little theatre, there's nagashi sōmen (流しそうめん): noodles sent down a channel of running water, often made from split bamboo, while diners try to catch them with their chopsticks. Our sōmen guide has more.

Autumn: mushrooms and new soba

As the air cools, mushrooms take centre stage. Shimeji, maitake and shiitake go into miso soups and hot pots, and the prized matsutake has its own celebrated dish, dobin mushi (土瓶蒸し): matsutake and other morsels steamed in dashi inside a small earthenware teapot. You pour the broth into a tiny cup and sip, often with a squeeze of citrus. In Yamagata and elsewhere in the Tōhoku region, autumn is also the season of imoni-kai (芋煮会), riverside gatherings around big pots of taro stew.

And for soba lovers, autumn means shin-soba (新そば), noodles made from the year's freshly harvested buckwheat. Shops often put up a sign when it arrives, and many people say it has a brighter aroma and a paler, greener tint. If you want to know what makes a great bowl, our soba guide is a good place to start.

I think this is the real secret of eating in Japan. You don't need a list of famous dishes so much as a calendar. Ask what's in season, and the soup will take care of the rest.