The Four Weeks Not to Travel in Japan

Golden Week: Late April to Early May Four national holidays fall within a week, and with a weekend at either end many people take the whole stretch off. Shinkansen reserved seats are booked out well in advance, expressways jam, and accommodation prices in tourist regions rise sharply. It is the single most crowded travel window of the year, and the one most likely to catch out visitors who assumed spring was a safe bet.

Obon: Mid-August Obon is when ancestors are believed to return to their families, so the country's population physically relocates — millions travelling from cities back to their hometowns. It is not a tourist rush so much as a national migration, which means transport is full in directions that have nothing to do with sightseeing. It is also, separately, hot and humid enough that outdoor plans need rethinking.

New Year: Roughly December 29 to January 3 This is Japan's most important holiday and the closest thing to a national shutdown. Small restaurants and family businesses close for several days, museums often close, and shrines are extremely busy for hatsumōde, the first shrine visit of the year. It can be a wonderful time to be here — but only if your plan is temples, food you've stocked, and staying put, rather than moving around and expecting things to be open.

Silver Week and the Odd Long Weekend A cluster of September holidays occasionally aligns into a run of consecutive days off, and there are several three-day weekends across the year that fill inns in onsen towns without affecting the cities much. These are the ones most likely to surprise you, because they aren't on foreign calendars.

The Flip Side: Cities Empty Out During Obon and New Year, Tokyo and Osaka become unusually quiet — the crowds have left for the countryside. If your trip has to fall in these windows, invert the plan: do the big cities during the holiday and the countryside on either side of it.

Why These Weeks Exist at All The underlying reason is that Japanese annual leave is not, in practice, taken freely across the year. Take-up of paid holiday has historically been low and taking long stretches individually is socially awkward in many workplaces, so the country largely holidays when the calendar tells it to. That concentrates most domestic travel into a handful of fixed windows.

This is why the effect is so extreme compared with countries where holidays are staggered. It is not that these weeks are somewhat busier; it is that a very large share of a nation of 120 million people travels within the same few days, in the same directions.

The Directions Matter During Obon and New Year the flow is outward from the big cities to the regions at the start and back in at the end, because people are returning to family homes. That means the crush is on the shinkansen and expressways leaving Tokyo and Osaka at the start of the period and returning at the end, with a comparatively calm middle.

Golden Week is different — it is genuine leisure travel, so the pressure lands on tourist destinations rather than on hometowns. Onsen towns, national parks and famous sites are the squeeze, and city hotels are less affected than resort accommodation.

Knowing which type of holiday you are in tells you what to avoid. Golden Week means stay out of the countryside's honeypots; Obon means avoid the intercity trains on the peak days and be relaxed about the middle of the week.

What Actually Closes New Year is the one where closure matters more than crowding. Many small restaurants, family-run shops and some museums close for several days around the turn of the year, and opening dates vary. Shrines, by contrast, are at their busiest of the entire year for hatsumōde.

Plan that week as a stationary one: a city, a neighbourhood you can walk, food arranged in advance, and shrine visits as the main event. Treated that way it is one of the most interesting weeks to be in Japan. Treated as a normal travelling week it is frustrating.