Lemon Day

What Is Lemon Day?

Every October 5th is "Lemon Day" (レモンの日, Remon no Hi) in Japan. The date commemorates October 5, 1938, when Chieko Takamura (智恵子, née Naganuma) — the wife and muse of poet and sculptor Kōtarō Takamura (高村光太郎) — died, reportedly clutching a lemon she had bitten into on her deathbed. This moment was immortalized in one of the most celebrated poems in modern Japanese literature: "Lemon Elegy" (レモン哀歌, Remon Aika), in which Kōtarō Takamura describes placing a lemon in his dying wife's hand and watching the "clear intelligence" briefly return to her eyes as she tasted it.

Chieko and the Lemon Elegy

Chieko Naganuma was an accomplished Western-style painter who married poet and sculptor Kōtarō Takamura in 1914. From the early 1930s, Chieko suffered from a progressive mental illness (likely schizophrenia), spending her final years in hospitalization. Kōtarō's poetry collection "Chieko-shō" (智恵子抄, 1941) — a sequence of poems spanning their life together, her illness, and her death — is one of the most moving accounts of love and loss in modern Japanese poetry. The "Lemon Elegy," composed at Chieko's deathbed, stands as its devastating climax.

The Poem That Made Lemons Famous

The opening lines of "Lemon Elegy" — "Sono massao na sora ni / Remon hitotsu wo / Oshitsukete" ("Into that deep blue sky / I pressed / a single lemon") — transformed the lemon from an ordinary fruit into a symbol of love, loss, and the brief radiance of clarity amid suffering. The poem is among the most memorized and recited in Japanese schools, and its imagery of the lemon as a vessel of final lucidity has given the fruit a unique cultural resonance in Japan.

The Lemon in Japanese Culture

Beyond its connection to the Takamura poem, the lemon has become firmly established in Japanese popular culture as a symbol associated with autumn melancholy, first love, and bittersweet emotion — partly through the poem's influence and partly through subsequent cultural works that have drawn on it. October 5th is observed as a day to read poetry, reflect on love and loss, and — of course — to enjoy the taste and fragrance of lemons.

Fun Facts

• Chieko-shō: Kōtarō Takamura's "Chieko-shō" poetry collection has never gone out of print in Japan since its 1941 publication and remains one of the most widely read collections of modern Japanese poetry.
• Lemon in Japanese pop music: Kenshi Yonezu's 2018 song "Lemon" (レモン) — inspired partly by personal loss and the poem's cultural associations — became one of the best-selling singles in Japanese music streaming history, demonstrating the enduring emotional resonance of the lemon symbol.