The three weeks of the year Japan is worth avoiding
Golden Week empties the offices and fills everywhere else. We plan around it rather than pretending it isn't happening.
Three weeks to plan around
Golden Week empties the offices and fills the trains, the ryokan, and every viewpoint that photographs well. Pretending it is a normal week is how people end up apologizing for a trip that was booked too late to be moved.
Our Japan specialist treats those three weeks as a closed season for the famous route, and an open one for the places the holiday does not reach. The dates go in the notes before the hotels do.
The calendar is not a footnote. If those dates are in the trip, everything else is planned around the fact that the country is on holiday, not around the hope that it will not feel like it.
Plan around it
If the trip can move, it moves. If it cannot, the itinerary changes shape: fewer changes of city, mornings that start before the day-trippers, and a frank list of what will be full no matter who you know. The week is not a surprise. Treating it like one is.
Japan is not worth avoiding. Those three weeks are worth refusing to pretend they are ordinary. Once that is written down, the rest of the country is as good as it ever is.
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