Where Do Japanese People Go on Holiday?

Ask a Japanese person where they went on their last holiday and the answer is very rarely one of the places on a foreign visitor’s list. It is usually a hot spring town, a seafood destination, a theme park, or their home town for Obon.

This is a useful lens. The domestic travel market is enormous — the great majority of Japanese tourism spending is domestic — and it has shaped where the good inns, the good food and the good transport are. Following it takes you to places that are excellent and entirely uncrowded by foreign visitors.

The onsen weekend

The single most common Japanese holiday is not a week anywhere. It is one or two nights at a hot spring inn, often within two or three hours of home, arriving mid-afternoon and leaving by ten.

This is why Japan has hundreds of onsen towns with dozens of inns each, in valleys most foreign visitors have never heard of. The economics are built around domestic weekenders, not international tourists.

The famous ones domestically: Kusatsu (Gunma), Gero (Gifu), Arima (Hyogo), Beppu and Yufuin (Oita), Hakone (Kanagawa), Atami (Shizuoka), Noboribetsu (Hokkaido), Ginzan (Yamagata), Kinosaki (Hyogo), Nyuto (Akita).

Annual rankings of Japan’s best onsen are published and taken seriously; Kusatsu has topped one of the main ones for years.

→ Onsen for beginners: rules, tattoos and the small towel

Going home

The other great pattern, and the reason for the annual traffic paralysis.

At Obon in August and New Year, millions of people travel to their jikka — the parents’ house, the family home — often in a prefecture they left for work at eighteen. This is kisei rush, the homecoming rush, and it is reported on the news like a weather event.

For visitors, it explains two things: why transport is impossible in those weeks, and why so much of rural Japan has a tourism infrastructure that seems out of proportion to its population. Some of it is not tourism at all. It is people going home.

Where they actually go

Roughly, in order of domestic popularity as destinations:

Tokyo — the biggest domestic destination in the country. Shopping, concerts, theatre, and Disney.

Osaka — food, Universal Studios, and a different city culture.

Hokkaido — the aspirational domestic trip: seafood, space, lavender in summer, snow in winter. Expensive by domestic standards because it needs a flight.

Chiba — almost entirely Tokyo Disney Resort, which draws well over 20 million visitors a year and is overwhelmingly domestic.

Okinawa — the beach holiday, and the domestic answer to Hawaii.

Kyoto — genuinely popular domestically too, especially for autumn colour and school trips.

Nagano and Niigata — skiing, and the mountains in summer.

Fukuoka — food, and the gateway for the whole of Kyushu.

The trips that structure a Japanese life

The school trip (shuugaku ryokou) — nearly every Japanese person visits Kyoto and Nara on a school trip in their teens, which is why so many adults have already seen the temples and are relaxed about not going again.

The graduation trip (sotsugyou ryokou) — a trip with friends between university and work, often the last extended free time before a career.

The honeymoon (shinkon ryokou) — historically Hawaii or Guam; now more often Europe or Japan itself.

Company trips (shain ryokou) — a whole department to an onsen, declining but not gone.

Theme parks

Larger in Japanese leisure than most visitors appreciate.

Tokyo Disney Resort in Chiba is among the most-visited theme park complexes in the world. Universal Studios Japan in Osaka is the other giant, and its Super Nintendo World opened in 2021.

Beyond those: Fuji-Q Highland for record-breaking roller coasters, Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki (a full-size Dutch town), Nagashima Spa Land in Mie, and Ghibli Park in Aichi, which opened in 2022 and is timed-entry and reservation-only.

Food as a destination

Japanese domestic travel is often organised entirely around eating a specific thing in a specific place — B-kyu gurume, everyday regional food, has a following that supports whole local economies.

People travel to Kagawa for udon, to Fukuoka for ramen and yatai, to Hokkaido for crab, to Kanazawa for seafood, and to Fukui for snow crab in season. This is not a marketing conceit; it is how weekends are planned.

→ Regional specialities, prefecture by prefecture

Overseas travel

Japanese outbound tourism was historically enormous and has not fully recovered its pre-2020 levels. The weak yen has made overseas trips markedly more expensive, and the popular destinations remain South Korea, Taiwan, Hawaii, Guam, Thailand and Vietnam — short flights, familiar infrastructure, and a strong yen advantage in some of them.

There is also a long tradition of package tours with a guide, particularly among older travellers, which shapes what Japanese visitors expect abroad.

What a visitor should take from this

Three practical uses.

Copy the onsen weekend. Two nights in a hot spring town most foreign visitors have never heard of will be better than a third night in Kyoto. Kinosaki, Kusatsu, Nyuto and Kurokawa are all set up for it.

Avoid the three peaks. Golden Week, Obon and New Year are when domestic travel saturates the system. Nothing you gain is worth what you lose.

Follow the food. If a prefecture is domestically famous for something, it is genuinely good and the infrastructure to serve it already exists.

Questions people actually ask

Do Japanese people visit Kyoto?

Yes, though most first saw it on a school trip as a teenager. Autumn colour and cherry blossom draw large domestic crowds; the rest of the year the visitor mix skews more international.

Why is everything booked in early May and mid-August?

Golden Week and Obon. Japan takes its holidays simultaneously rather than staggered, so the entire country travels in the same fortnight twice a year.

Where would a Japanese person recommend I go?

Very often an onsen town, and very often their own home prefecture. Ask — the answer is usually somewhere excellent that no guidebook covers.

Is domestic travel expensive for Japanese people?

Rail is, which is why highway buses and domestic budget airlines are large industries. Accommodation is reasonable outside the peak weeks, and government travel subsidy campaigns have periodically supported it.

Do Japanese people travel abroad much?

Less than they did. Outbound numbers have not returned to pre-2020 levels, and the weak yen has made overseas travel considerably more expensive.