If you speak with any Japanese person for long enough about what makes the country great, praise for Japan’s four seasons inevitably comes up at some point in the conversation. Whether it is wrapped in the framing of food or the beauty of the seasons themselves, Japanese people are extremely proud of their four distinct seasons. And, as anyone who has seen the vibrant colors of autumn or contemplated the ephemeral nature of the cherry blossoms can attest, there’s a heck of a lot to be proud of.
Alas, and this is the kind of keen insight that you come to this blog for, Japan isn’t the only country in the world to have spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Yes, few can hold a candle to Japan’s majestic beauty, but it’s not exactly unique.What does set Japan apart, though, is the fact that the locals here have a far deeper appreciation for the subtleties of the seasons. In fact, as you’ll see in the coming sections, Japan has a system of categorizing the various times of the year that goes way beyond anything in the West.
Japan Has Four Seasons — So Does Iowa
At the risk of sounding repetitive, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Yes, Japan does have four very distinct and beautiful seasons. No, the mere fact of having four of them does not make Japan in any way special on its own. In fact, it’s largely the norm for most of the world that occupies the same latitudinal location on the globe. Case in point, much of Europe and North America have the same sort of annual ebbs and flows to their seasons as the months roll by.
While just the mere act of having spring, summer, autumn, and winter may not set Japan apart, what those seasons constitute certainly does. From the cherry blossoms in spring to the celebratory festivals in summer, there is a unique flavor to each of the four seasons in Japan. What’s more, the main four islands of Japan run quite a distance lengthwise, meaning that the way the seasons get expressed in Aomori City is very different from the way they are in Kagoshima City down at the bottom of Kyushu.
Seeing as each of the seasons has its own charm and flair, there is no single correct answer to the question of when to come to Japan, which is both helpful and deeply annoying for anyone trying to plan the perfect trip. You could come in autumn for the fabulous fall foliage, or you could come during the snowier months of the year for some of the best powder in the world. With so much variety, even within a single season, the only way to experience it all is to continue to come back to Japan again and again.
Japan’s Old Calendar Had Better Categories
Okay, so as noted above, Japan has more ways of categorizing the seasons than the global standard of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. One of the best examples of this is the 24 Sekki, a traditional calendar system that divides the year into twenty-four roughly fifteen-day periods based on the sun’s movement. Imported from China and later adapted into Japan’s own calendar culture, the Sekki break the big four into smaller turns, making the calendar less of an abstract date-keeping system and more of a running commentary on what the world outside was supposed to be doing.
Some of these Sekki are still reasonably well known today, even if reciting all twenty-four from memory is not exactly a common party trick. Risshun marks the beginning of spring, though it usually arrives in early February when much of the country is still freezing. Shunbun and Shubun, the spring and autumn equinoxes, remain familiar thanks to national holidays and the Buddhist observance of Higan. Geshi marks the summer solstice, Toji marks the winter solstice, and Daikan lands in late January when winter is at its most deeply unpleasant.
For travelers, the Sekki are less useful as a rigid planning tool and more useful as a way to understand what kind of Japan you are stepping into. Risshun may say spring has begun, but plum blossoms and cold air are the real story. Kokuu, the “grain rain,” points toward the wet, green build-up to rice planting. Shosho and Taisho are your warning that the summer heat is no longer playing around, while Kanro and Soko track autumn as it sharpens into dew, frost, and eventually peak foliage in the mountains.
When Five Days Counts as a Season
As previously explained in the subsection just above, each Sekki is 15 days long, and these blocks can be divided into three 5-day microseasons known as Ko. Yup, you read that right! Japan actually has as many as 72 categorizations for seasonal timings. Where the 24 Sekki already make the global notions of spring, summer, autumn, and winter look woefully underdeveloped, the 72 Ko go even further by tracking the year through birds, flowers, insects, frost, fog, rain, and all sorts of other tiny changes.
Unsurprisingly, the full 72 Ko are not exactly common knowledge these days—at least outside of the rare kind of chap who just happens to be a classical calendar enjoyer. Still, the system is useful because it shows just how specific Japan’s old calendar could get when it came to reading the natural world. You can read about all 72 in this Wikipedia article, but half the fun is just looking at the direct translations of their names. To a native English speaker, entries like “Deer shed their antlers” for December 27 to 31 are bound to get at least a little giggle.
For travelers from abroad, the classical 72 Ko are not something you need to plan your trip around in any strict sense. That said, what they do offer is a better way to understand Japan’s seasonal texture. Cherry blossoms, autumn leaves, and snow are the obvious markers, but the smaller handoffs are often where the year gets interesting. Frogs start singing. Plums turn yellow. Cicadas give way to crickets. The calendar becomes less about four giant blocks of time and more about noticing the seamless flow of the seasons between.
When Rotten Grass Becomes Fireflies
OK, let’s take a look at some of the various Ko. One of the first of the year is Harukaze Kori o Toku, or “East Wind Melts the Ice,” which lands around February 4 to 8. On paper, that sounds like spring politely knocking on the door while winter is still passed out on the couch. In practice, it lines up nicely with places like Kawazu, where Kawazu-zakura begin blooming far ahead of the usual cherry blossom madness. This is not peak cherry blossom Japan yet, when the Somei Yoshino bloom. It is the first pink flare that the year is starting to move again.
Another good one is Takenoko Shozu, or “Bamboo Shoots Sprout,” which falls around May 15 to 20. This is where the Ko system starts to make more sense as a food calendar than a weather calendar. Right after Golden Week, bamboo shoots are one of spring’s great seasonal ingredients in Japan. They show up in rice dishes, simmered dishes, soups, and anywhere else their earthy crunch can be properly deployed. By this point, cherry blossom season is yesterday’s news. The year has moved from looking at flowers to eating the things pushing their way out of the ground.
Thereafter, there is the wonderfully strange-sounding Kusaretaru Kusa Hotaru to Naru, or “Rotten Grass Becomes Fireflies,” which falls around June 11 to 15. The name comes from an old belief that fireflies actually emerged from rotting grass, which is the sort of pre-modern nature observation that the Ko system is full of. Whatever the entomological accuracy, the phrase captures the season better than a clean scientific label would. The air is wet. The greenery is thick. The rainy season is settling in. This is the kind of Ko that shows why the system is worth knowing about. It is not only tracking what happens. It is tracking what the season feels like.
Right after that comes Ume-no-Mi Kibamu, or “Plums Turn Yellow,” around June 16 to 20. This one connects directly to Ume-shigoto, the seasonal work of turning plum into things like umeshu and umeboshi. In other words, the calendar is not just saying, “the fruit changed color.” It is pointing to the moment when households, shops, and producers start doing something with that fruit. While cherry blossoms may get most of the attention, plum blossoms actually bear fruit that gets turned into booze, pickles, and sour little flavor bombs that keep showing up long after spring has made its graceful exit.
The Best Seasons for Eating in Japan
While this Japan travel blog rarely features food, seasonal dishes are one of the best parts about the various times of the year. Japanese cuisine places a lot of pride on Shun, or the moment when an ingredient is at its seasonal best. This can be something as delicate as spring bamboo shoots, something as obvious as autumn Matsutake mushrooms, or something as simple as new rice after the harvest. Whatever the case, each season in Japan has flavors that belong to it, and paying attention to them is one of the easiest ways to feel the year moving.
Spring brings things like bamboo shoots, strawberries, and the annual flood of sakura-flavored sweets in every conceivable form. Summer leans into cooling foods like cold noodles, shaved ice, watermelon, and eel. All things considered, though, autumn is probably the heavyweight champion here, with new rice, sweet potatoes, chestnuts, mushrooms, Pacific saury, and persimmons all making their seasonal appearances. Winter, meanwhile, is the domain of hot pots, simmered dishes, and other foods that make a lot more sense when the weather outside is being deeply unreasonable.
Perhaps the best way to experience this side of Japan is to eat somewhere that places a lot of care on seasonality. Here, a ryokan meal is the classic move, especially if you are staying somewhere rural where the kitchen can lean into local produce, river fish, mountain vegetables, or whatever else is good in that neck of the woods. Kaiseki is the more refined version, with each course designed around seasonal ingredients, colors, tableware, and presentation. You do not need to go full baller every time you eat out in Japan, but at least once, it is worth having a meal where the calendar is part of the menu.
The Seasons You’re Going to Suffer Through
Beyond the classical categorizations, there are also unofficial times of the year in Japan that are not quite as alluring as Momiji Tsuta Kibamu (“Maple Leaves and Ivy Turn Yellow”). These are the times of the year that do not usually make it into the pretty tourism copy that the likes of JNTO puts out. After all, no one is flying halfway across the world because they heard Japan’s cedar pollen is especially aggressive in March. Still, these less glamorous periods are just as much a part of the seasonal rhythm as cherry blossoms, fireflies, and autumn leaves.
The first big offender is pollen season, which starts creeping in around February and tends to make itself properly known in March. If you see people walking around Japan in masks with watery eyes and the general demeanor of someone betrayed by nature, this is probably why. Cedar and cypress pollen are the main culprits, and for a sizable chunk of the population, early spring is less about frolicking beneath blossoms and more about losing a war against their own sinuses. The cruel part, of course, is that this overlaps with some of the prettiest weeks of the year.
Then comes Tsuyu, or the “Rainy Season” in English, which usually runs from around early June to mid-July in much of Japan. As it says on the can, this is the time of the year when it rains quite often, and while the hydrangeas certainly redeem it, things can get quite wet. Once the rains finally finish falling, summer arrives in full force, bringing heat, humidity, cicadas, and the annual reminder that concrete cities are not mankind’s finest contribution to the climate. It’s a great time to escape north to somewhere like Furano and Biei up in Hokkaido.
Finally, there is typhoon season, which tends to cause trouble from late summer into early autumn. Unlike pollen or humidity, typhoons do not merely make travel unpleasant. They can completely blow up an itinerary. Trains stop, flights get canceled, ferries stay in port, and outdoor plans suddenly become very stupid ideas. Most typhoons pass without turning into national disasters, but even a relatively normal one can strand you somewhere for a day or two. This is not a reason to avoid Japan altogether during the period, but it is a very good reason to watch the weather.
The Seasons You Actually Travel to Japan For
While the 24 Sekki and the 72 Ko are nice to know about, what matters more for people planning trips to Japan is what they can actually see throughout the year. Starting in January, the colder months tend to be a bit more somber. Outside of the ski slopes and snow country, much of Japan is quiet, chilly, and slowly recovering from the New Year’s holiday period. That does not make it a bad time to visit, mind you. It just means the country is operating at a lower hum before the seasonal machinery starts lurching toward spring.
February is where things begin to get interesting again. The main cherry blossom rush has not yet arrived, but early-blooming Kawazu-zakura are already in flower at places like Matsuda’s Nishihirabatake Park from mid-February, and Sakura Jingu in Tokyo runs its own modest bloom around the same window. Plum blossoms also peak around this time at gardens like Mito’s Kairakuen and Atami Baien, which makes February a nice little cheat code for travelers who want flowers without the full-body contact sport that is late March and early April. It is still cold, yes, but it is the kind of cold that starts coming with hints of what is next.
Then, of course, comes the main cherry blossom season. In much of central Japan, the Somei Yoshino bloom around late March and early April, bringing with them all the hanami picnics, forecast watching, and mild crowd-related nonsense that the season entails. The nice thing, though, is that cherry blossom season is not a single moment. It moves north and upward. By the time Tokyo and Kyoto are long done, places in Tohoku are often just getting started, with spots like Hirosaki Castle Park carrying the season well into late April.
After that comes Golden Week, which is both a lovely time of year and a scheduling ambush if you are not paying attention. May itself is excellent for getting outdoors, especially once the worst of the spring pollen has started to calm down. This is when places like Kamikochi open for the season in mid-April and become especially appealing through May, with snow still lingering on the Hotaka peaks while the Azusa River valley below opens up into fresh green. Wisteria peaks at sites like Ashikaga Flower Park, and the moss gardens of places like Kyoto’s Saiho-ji hit their best window before the rains arrive.
Then the rainy season arrives, and while that sounds miserable on paper, it at least has the decency to bring hydrangeas with it. Kamakura is the classic play here, with temples like Meigetsu-in and Hasedera becoming seasonal heavy hitters once the blooms come in. That said, places like Unsho-ji up in Akita also make a strong case that rain is easier to forgive when it comes with a ridiculous number of blue flowers. No one should pretend Tsuyu is secretly perfect travel weather, but if you are going to be damp anyway, you might as well be damp somewhere pretty.
From there, things get real hot and sultry, but this is also when a lot of the festival fun happens. Summer in Japan is brutal, no getting around that, but it is also the season of the big three Tohoku festivals in early August, the Sumida River Fireworks in late July, the Awa Odori in Tokushima in mid-August, and countless smaller neighborhood matsuri that make the heat feel at least somewhat justified. If you are going to travel during this time, the trick is to plan around evenings, festivals, mountains, coastlines, and any available body of air conditioning.
Survive summer, though, and the calendar starts making it up to you. Around the autumn equinox, red spider lilies bloom in bright, almost unnatural-looking clusters at locales like Saitama’s Kinchakuda Manjushage Park and Nara’s Asuka village. They are one of the first signs that the humid furnace is finally winding down. After that, of course, comes the fall foliage, on which much ink has already been spilled on this blog before. Maples, ginkgo trees, mountain valleys, temple gardens, and old castle towns all get their moment, with the foliage front sweeping south from Hokkaido in late September down to Kyoto and Nara by November.
Finally, things circle back to winter once again. The leaves fall, the air sharpens, and the country moves toward winter illuminations like Nabana-no-Sato in Mie Prefecture, the snow festivals of Sapporo and Otaru in early February, hatsumode shrine visits at the New Year, and ski seasons that run from December into April depending on how far north you go. Japan is not one seasonal experience but a rotating cast of them, and every time of year comes with its own tradeoffs. Some are obvious, like cherry blossoms and autumn leaves. Others are stranger, quieter, wetter, hotter, or more delicious.
Until next time travelers…
