Japan has sixteen national public holidays, more than the United States or the United Kingdom. And yet the two periods when the country truly grinds to a halt are not among them.
It’s the kind of detail that ruins a trip. You look at an official calendar, you see that mid-August has no public holiday, you book, and you end up standing for four hours on a shinkansen with half the country heading back to their hometowns. Here is what you need to know before picking your dates.
The short answer
- The three periods to avoid: Golden Week (late April to early May), Obon (around August 15) and New Year (December 28 to January 3).
- The trap: of those three, only one is made of public holidays. Obon and New Year are customs, not official dates, and that is exactly why nobody sees them coming.
- A single public holiday: changes almost nothing for a traveler. Trains run, museums open, and konbini have never closed in their lives.
- What actually closes: banks, government offices, clinics, and many small neighborhood restaurants.
If you remember only one thing: a Japanese public holiday is not a problem, a public holiday week is.
The sixteen public holidays, in calendar order
The official list is kept by the Cabinet Office of Japan (in Japanese). The dates below are for 2027, the useful year if you are planning a trip now.
- January 1 (Friday): New Year’s Day, 元日. The only public holiday in the long New Year break.
- January 11 (Monday): Coming of Age Day, 成人の日. Second Monday of January. Twenty-year-olds pose in kimono outside city halls, and it’s very photogenic.
- February 11 (Thursday): National Foundation Day, 建国記念の日.
- February 23 (Tuesday): The Emperor’s Birthday, 天皇誕生日.
- March 21 (Sunday): Vernal Equinox Day, 春分の日. Since it falls on a Sunday, it gives a substitute holiday on Monday March 22.
- April 29 (Thursday): Shōwa Day, 昭和の日. This is the start of Golden Week.
- May 3 (Monday): Constitution Memorial Day, 憲法記念日.
- May 4 (Tuesday): Greenery Day, みどりの日.
- May 5 (Wednesday): Children’s Day, こどもの日. Koinobori carp have been flying everywhere for a month.
- July 19 (Monday): Marine Day, 海の日. Third Monday of July.
- August 11 (Wednesday): Mountain Day, 山の日. The newest one, created in 2016.
- September 20 (Monday): Respect for the Aged Day, 敬老の日. Third Monday of September.
- September 23 (Thursday): Autumnal Equinox Day, 秋分の日.
- October 11 (Monday): Sports Day, スポーツの日. Second Monday of October, in memory of the opening of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
- November 3 (Wednesday): Culture Day, 文化の日.
- November 23 (Tuesday): Labor Thanksgiving Day, 勤労感謝の日.
The three periods that really matter
The rest of this page is detail. These three blocks decide whether your trip will be pleasant or exhausting.
Golden Week, April 29 to May 5. Four public holidays in one week, and the whole country goes on vacation at the same time. In 2027 the layout is fairly kind: April 29 is an isolated Thursday, then the real block runs from Saturday May 1 to Wednesday May 5. Shinkansen tickets sell out a month ahead, ryokan double their rates, and the best-known sights become hard work. I wrote a separate guide to it, because there is a way to enjoy it instead of enduring it.
Obon, around August 15. And here the important piece of information is the one calendars don’t give you: Obon is not a public holiday. No official date, nothing on the Cabinet Office list. It’s a Buddhist festival for welcoming back the dead, and most companies close of their own accord, roughly August 13 to 16. As a result, tens of millions of people cross the country in both directions, and a traveler who only checked the official calendar never saw it coming. It’s also a beautiful time, with the lanterns and the summer matsuri, but you need to book early and accept the crowds.
New Year, December 28 to January 3. Same mechanism: a single official holiday, January 1, and a whole week running at half speed. Many restaurants, museums and neighborhood shops pull down their shutters. On the other hand, shrines are full of life for hatsumōde, and Tokyo emptied of its residents has a calm you won’t find at any other time.
What closes, and what never has
Travelers usually panic for nothing. On a single public holiday, Japan works.
Open: trains and subways, sometimes on a weekend timetable, which can matter on rural lines. Konbini, obviously. Department stores and shopping malls, often busier than usual. National museums and most tourist sights.
Closed: banks and their counters, city halls and anything administrative, clinics and dentists, neighborhood post offices. And a good share of the small family-run restaurants, which enjoy the holiday like everyone else.
One detail that can save a day: many Japanese museums close on Mondays. When the Monday is a public holiday, they open, and close on the Tuesday instead. Always check, especially after a holiday Monday.
Substitute holidays, and the holiday that appears out of nowhere
Two Japanese rules that confuse people, and that explain why the calendar shifts from one year to the next.
The first is furikae kyūjitsu: if a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday becomes a holiday. That’s the case in 2027 with the Vernal Equinox on Sunday March 21, which gives a day off on Monday March 22.
The second is stranger. A working day sandwiched between two public holidays becomes a holiday in turn. This is the mechanism that creates September’s Silver Week, when Respect for the Aged Day falls on a Monday and the Autumnal Equinox on a Wednesday: the Tuesday in between becomes a day off and the country gets five days in a row. It doesn’t happen often. It happened in 2026, and the next time will be 2032. In 2027, Monday the 20th and Thursday the 23rd of September are too far apart, so there is no bridge.
The equinoxes, the two dates nobody knows in advance
This is my favorite oddity of the Japanese calendar. The other fourteen public holidays are fixed by law, either to a date or to a given Monday. The two equinoxes are astronomical. They depend on the exact moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator, which makes them drift between March 20 and 21, and between September 22 and 23.
The upshot: these dates only become official on February 1 of the previous year, when the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan publishes its almanac. You can calculate them ahead of time, and I did for this page, but until the almanac is out they are forecasts. If your trip straddles an equinox, double-check.
What it means for your trip
In practice, three reflexes.
Book your nights before anything else if your dates touch one of the three blocks. Accommodation goes long before trains do, and that’s where prices explode, as I explain in the budget guide.
Buy your shinkansen tickets as soon as sales open, one month before departure, if you are traveling during Golden Week or Obon. Outside those periods, booking the day before is plenty, see how to get around Japan.
And above all, shift your dates if you can. A week before or after one of these blocks, it’s the same country with a tenth of the people and normal prices. It’s the reasoning behind my whole month-by-month calendar.
One last word, less practical. Japanese public holidays say something about the country: there is a day for the sea, one for the mountains, one for greenery, one for respecting the elderly. Not a single battle, not a single revolution. You could find that bland. I find it rather beautiful.