The Japanese Work Year, Explained by Its Holidays

Japan has sixteen public holidays — more than the UK, France, Germany or the United States. It also has a long-standing reputation for people not taking their annual leave.

These two facts are connected, and together they explain the single most consequential thing about travelling in Japan: the entire country goes on holiday at the same time, three times a year.

Why nobody takes their leave

Japanese employees are entitled to paid leave — around ten days after six months, rising to twenty after six and a half years — and for decades took roughly half of it.

The reasons are structural rather than legal:

Colleagues absorb your work. Japanese teams are often staffed without slack, so an absence lands directly on the person at the next desk. Taking leave is felt as imposing on colleagues, which runs against a deep social norm.

Nobody goes first. Leave-taking is socially calibrated. If your section chief does not take theirs, taking yours is conspicuous.

Unused days carry forward for up to two years, then lapse — so there is always a reason to postpone.

Leave is often used for illness. Japan has no separate statutory sick pay for many employees, so paid leave doubles as sick leave and people hold days back.

In 2019 the law changed: employers must now ensure employees take at least five days of their entitlement, with penalties for failing to. Take-up has risen since — but the shape of the year has not changed much.

The consequence: everybody moves at once

If individual leave is difficult, the alternative is the public holiday, when the whole company closes and nobody is imposing on anybody.

The result is three periods when roughly the entire population travels simultaneously.

Golden Week — late April to early May

Four public holidays fall in a single week: Showa Day (29 April), Constitution Day (3 May), Greenery Day (4 May) and Children’s Day (5 May). With weekends, most people get seven to ten consecutive days — for many, the longest continuous break of the year.

What happens: Shinkansen reserved seats sell out weeks ahead, expressways report traffic jams of thirty kilometres or more, hotel prices roughly double, and the famous sites are at their absolute peak.

Obon — around 13–16 August

Not a public holiday in law, but observed by most of the private sector.

A Buddhist observance in which ancestors’ spirits are said to return home. Families travel to their home towns, clean graves, and hold services. Some regions light fires to welcome and send off the spirits; Kyoto’s Gozan no Okuribi on 16 August burns giant characters into five hillsides.

What happens: the kisei rush, the homecoming rush, reported nightly on the news with live coverage of station platforms. Combined with the hottest fortnight of the year.

New Year — 28 December to 4 January

The most important holiday in the calendar, and the only time the country genuinely closes.

Shops shut, restaurants close, and offices go dark for about a week. Families gather, eat osechi from lacquered boxes, and make hatsumode, the first shrine visit of the year — tens of millions of people in the first three days.

What happens: transport is packed on the travel days at either end, then unusually quiet in between. Shrines are extraordinary.

→ The Japanese year: hanami, tsuyu, momiji and New Year

The sixteen holidays

Several were deliberately moved to Mondays under the “Happy Monday” reforms from 2000, to create three-day weekends — an attempt to spread leisure demand that has had only partial success.

Marine Day and Mountain Day are worth noting as genuinely unusual: a maritime nation and a mountainous one, each with a national holiday for the fact.

If a holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday becomes a substitute holiday. A weekday sandwiched between two holidays also becomes one.

The rhythm of the working year

1 April — the fiscal year, the school year and the corporate year all begin. New graduates start on the same day in identical suits at ceremonies held across the country. Transfers move families. This is why cherry blossom carries such weight: it coincides exactly with beginnings.

Late April to early May — Golden Week.

June — the only month with no public holiday, and the rainy season. Widely disliked.

July — shochu mimai, mid-year greeting gifts, and the summer bonus.

August — Obon, and the heat.

October–November — the busiest conventional working period, and the best weather.

December — bonenkai, “forget the year” parties, held by every workplace and social group through the month. Then the winter bonus, then New Year.

January–February — the quietest stretch. Also shunto, the spring wage offensive, when unions negotiate the annual pay rise that sets the tone for the whole economy.

Is it changing?

Slowly, and in real ways.

The 2019 labour reforms capped overtime with legal penalties and mandated minimum leave-taking. Average annual working hours have fallen substantially over thirty years and are now close to the US figure. Remote work expanded permanently after 2020 in white-collar sectors.

Karoshi — death from overwork — remains a recognised legal category with compensation claims each year, and the fact that the word exists tells you what the culture had to reckon with.

Younger workers change jobs far more readily than their parents did, and the lifetime-employment bargain that justified the intensity is weakening.

What this means for a visitor

Practical, and worth taking seriously.

Avoid Golden Week, Obon and New Year if your dates are flexible. Prices roughly double, reserved seats sell out weeks ahead, and the famous places are at their most crowded.

If you cannot avoid them: stay in one city rather than moving, book everything as far ahead as possible, and use the days when everyone else is travelling to visit somewhere in the city they have all left.

Note the closures. New Year in particular closes a great many restaurants and shops for several days.

→ When to visit Japan: month-by-month weather, crowds and prices

Questions people actually ask

Do Japanese people really work extreme hours?

Less than the stereotype and less than they did. Legal overtime caps came in from 2019, and average annual hours are now close to the US figure. Long hours persist in specific industries and among regular employees at large firms.

How many days off do employees get?

Sixteen public holidays plus roughly twenty days of statutory paid leave after several years. Take-up of the paid leave has historically been about half, though a legal minimum of five days now applies.

Why does everyone travel at the same time?

Because taking individual leave is socially difficult, so the public holidays do the work. Golden Week, Obon and New Year are when the whole country is simultaneously free.

Should I avoid those weeks entirely?

If you can. Prices roughly double, reserved seats vanish, and expressways jam. If you are already committed, stay in one place rather than trying to move between cities.

What is a bonenkai?

A “forget the year” party held by workplaces and social groups through December. Eating and drinking, often at an izakaya, and effectively obligatory in many companies. December is the busiest month of the year for restaurants.

Is anything open at New Year?

Convenience stores, some chain restaurants, and shrines — which are extremely busy. Department stores reopen on 2 or 3 January with fukubukuro, sealed lucky bags of discounted goods, which people queue for.