If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I usually don’t stray much from urban exploration, but this week inspired me to a little rant about one of Japan’s holy cows: Golden Week. Still related to urban exploration as it massively affected my explorations this year…
What is Golden Week? Golden Week is a rather massive accumulation of public holidays in Japan in late April and early May.
April 29th: Showa Day / 昭和の日 / shōwa no hi (being dedicated to Emperor Showa / Hirohito who reigned from 1926 to 1989 – his controversial role in WW2 is still disputed…)
May 3rd: Constitution Memorial Day / 憲法記念日 / kenpō kinenbi
May 4th: Greenery Day / みどりの日 / midori no hi
May 5th: Children’s Day / こどもの日 / kodomo no hi (widely known as Boys’ Day / 端午の節句 / tango no sekku – have you ever seen photos of those colourful carp banners? They are related to this day…)
With that many national holidays close to each other you have to take two or three days off and can be absent from for a whole week (or as a Japanese friend counts it: taking off 9 days) – and Japanese people, usually known for being reluctant to take off days from work even if they are sick, do exactly that in large numbers. In fact so many people take off days from work during Golden Week that you actually kinda have to justify yourself if you don’t do it. Or as a Japanese proverb says: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. You really don’t wanna stick out…
This sudden increase of spare time for a lot of people, glorified by the term Golden Week, of course comes with a couple of detriments that are widely ignored since… well, it’s friggin Golden Week and everybody has to love it! Like New Year’s Eve parties and Christmas with the whole family…
So I will say publicly what most Japanese wouldn’t even dare to say on the quiet: Golden Week sucks! Big time!
Most of the points on the list are interacting with (or are depending on) each other, so the order is kind of interchangeable.
5.) Forced paid vacation days
When you are an employee of a Japanese company in Japan you usually don’t get a lot of paid vacation days. Between 10 and maybe 15 per year the most – a ridiculous amount to the 25 to 36 (!) I’m used to in my home country of Germany. There are no sick days either. So even if you have to go to a doctor you have to take half a day off to see one on your own time and partially on your own dime (co-payment is 30% with the standard health insurance – of anything! Consultation, medication, …). While a lot of Japanese people jump on the idea of taking two days off to create a week of not going to work others are reluctant to do that – because they actually have work to do, because they don’t feel like going on vacation, especially when everybody is going (see #4, #3, and #2), because… whatever reason. So some companies use the opportunity to flush out those two or three vacation days by “recommending” their employees to take them off. And by Japanese communication standards “recommending” means “ordering”. Last year the company I work for used the opportunity of Golden Week to install new ACs after recommending everybody to take days off, making it virtually impossible to not follow the recommendation. Sure, I could have made a fuzz and insisted on moving to floors where no installation work was going on – but that would have been pretty much like pissing in the face of an LA cop after he stopped you for drunk driving…
4.) Prices increase massively
A lot of people use the free week to travel – visiting family and going on vacation. Since prices depend on supply and demand the costs for hotels, train and airplane tickets, rental cars and in some case even food rise significantly. JR charges a special “high season” surcharge for seat reservations and hotels tend to charge holiday prices even for the non-holiday days of Golden Week – but special prices are not a rarity in general; and those are not special discount offers…
3.) Everything is crowded
No matter where you go, everything is crowded. Hotels are fully booked often weeks in advance. The non-reservation cars of Shinkansen superexpress trains are so crowded that JR employees ask travellers not to get on even before the train arrives at a station – and that happened to me at 6 a.m.! You have insanely long waiting lines in front of restaurants and at amusement parks; that’s crazy busy even by the standards of a country where the first opening of a Coldstone Creamery ice cream shop created waiting lines of up to two hours for weeks!
2.) No spontaneity
In daily (work) life I often have the feeling that Japanese people can’t plan. Hell, some colleagues have the job title of “Planner” and they wouldn’t be able to plan their way out of a paper bag. But that’s not entirely true. Japanese people can plan if you give them enough time to do so – hence the intervals of as little as 2.5 minutes on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, a train loop line in the city centre of Japan’s capital.
What most Japanese people have a hard time with is improvising – when things don’t go according to plan a lot of them are in deep trouble. So I guess Golden Week really caters to the Japanese way of living. You plan it weeks or even months ahead of time and it doesn’t really matter that there is absolutely no chance for spontaneity – everything is set in stone anyways.
I’m a person that is extremely well organized at work and I’m fairly adaptable to unforeseen situations; especially since it’s part of my job. In my spare time I like to mix up things a little bit. When I plan an urbex trip I have an idea of the locations I want to see, but I always have alternatives ready, just in case I need or want to change plans. Usually I don’t book hotels in advance and I don’t make seat reservations on trains as I feel it would lock me down too much. What if I want to stay at a location shorter or longer? Or switch orders for whatever reasons? I like to keep it flexible. Which really backfired this week and inspired me to write down what I was thinking for years: Golden Week sucks!
I went down to Northern Kyushu to explore a couple of locations I was longing to see for months or even years. When I arrived in my beloved Sasebo I was told that there were no rooms available. At all. Not a single one for one night. I was aware of the risk, but it always worked out so far, so I asked the lovely ladies at the local tourist information to phone around after I went to the usual suspects myself. After more than a dozen calls and to the growing frustration of my helpers they finally found a ryokan on Oshima with a room available – Oshima was on my way to revisit Ikeshima, so it was a perfect match. My Japanese isn’t great, so I only spoke English at the tourist information, but I understand a little bit of the local language. After the tourist office lady told me that she found a room I heard her telling the ryokan staff in Japanese that was American (which I’m not, but I guess every white person speaking decent English is automatically classified as American) and if that would be okay. And all of a sudden the room situation was difficult (muzukashii, むずかしい). If something is “difficult” in Japan it basically means that it is not going to happen – the reason doesn’t matter. It’s difficult and nobody wants to deal with difficult situation, so that’s it. While “yes” usually means “I understand” and not necessarily “yes, that is what we are going to do”, “difficult” is the polite version of “no”; or whatever is considered polite in Japan…
Not having a room for the night thanks to a racist ryokan with the last available room in all of the Sasebo area (yes, I’m playing the racist card here – politically correct or not! Unless you lived in Japan for a while you have no idea how xenophobic Japanese people can be. If you are polite in English and racist in Japanese about 6 billion people worldwide won’t understand what you are saying…) I decided to cut my exploration plans from 4 days to 3 days by skipping Ikeshima. So I went back to Hakata Station in Fukuoka, the most populous city in Kyushu. The tourist information centre there was way less helpful and didn’t even try. No rooms in Fukuoka, probably nowhere in Northern Kyushu. That’s what they told me and ended the conversation. So I decided to go back home – after getting up at 4.40 in the morning, standing in crowded JR trains for more than 4 hours (on the way down to Kyushu alone!) and spending around 35.000 Yen on train tickets I learned the hard way how much Golden Week sucks, especially if you dare to try it the oh so hated spontaneous way… and that there are no available hotel rooms in Northern Kyushu, at least not if you are a foreigner in Japan; which really, really disappointed me as I love Japan. Otherwise I wouldn’t go into my seventh year of living here soon…
1.) No escape
You can’t escape Golden Week. Even if you are smart enough to stay at home and not to go on spontaneous trips. Well, maybe if you live in some mountain village you won’t be affected, but I’m sure they have special Golden Week shows on TV, too. But everybody else is affected negatively by Golden Week in one way or the other. Especially smaller businesses close during Golden Week, which means that the neighbourhood bakery is most likely closed. So are mom and dad restaurants if you need a decent meal during lunch break; same goes for the local waterhole. Supermarkets most likely close earlier or even completely. If you wanna go anywhere on the weekends involving Golden Week those places will most likely be busier. You just can’t escape it…
Sure, Japan is a rich country and in the end all those things are only minor annoyances to be filed under “First World Problems”, not tragedies of epic proportions; but they are nevertheless annoyances that make the term Golden Week rather misleading. I remember a colleague once telling me in a different context that “you can’t polish shit”. Well, I guess in Japan(ese) you can – and the turd of this golden calf is called Golden Week!
Abandoned Kansai 
Love it! Nice deviation from the normal posts yet still able to give people an insight into Golden Week.
Hey Brandon,
Thanks! This experience gave me the opportunity to vent some frustrations about Golden Week in general – people tend to only write good things about their stay in Japan, but all that glitters is not gold. Japan is a great country to live in, but it’s not as perfect as certain people think it is.
Wow, it’s too bad your experience of Golden Week is so terrible! I chose to stay here in Osaka city, where I live, and enjoyed my near ghost town surroundings all week long! All the sheep go off on their fancy holiday destinations and leave the city to people who actually enjoy being in it! It was fantastic to actually be able to ride my bike through the streets without having to dodge countless old ladies, kids or salarymen! :). Other years, I’ve been forced to work the entire week, so I’m grateful when I can enjoy the whole time off.
Hey Tiles,
I’m running out of interesting places to explore in Kansai (no worries, there’s plenty of stuff to write about I already explored!), so I thought it would be a good chance to go on a trip… I was wrong. Should have stayed in Kansai, but the weather here was a lot worse than in Kyushu. Well, stuff happens…
I stayed at home as well (I live in Tokyo), I’m taking some sneaky days off in June anyway! The one thing that annnoyed me about Golden Week was not being able to access the Post Office ATMs, I’ve had to survive a week on limited resources. Yay.
Hey Kat,
I’ve heard those horror stories about ATMs not working. It seems like the situation got better and I thought by now all banks, including the Post Office, wouldn’t shut down their ATMs, but when I came to live in Japan 6 years ago I was warned that during GW and on some public holidays ATMs wouldn’t work. Weird…
Mmm, you weren’t very lucky. I just came back for a haikyo trip of 9 days (100% Golden Week) in Kansai / Shikoku / Kyushu, all using cars, night buses, and a shinkansen to come back. I found really easily a place to spend the night every single day : manga kissaten mostly and 3 cheap hotels. I travel with a laptop + internet in the car, so we always look for a place to stay on the way, and call the places to book in few hours in advance, or, in the case of manga kissaten, we ask if they have shower (they always have free rooms anyways). And surprisingly, I didn’t end-up in any huge traffic jams on the road, but enjoyed a lot of nice food, much cheaper than in Tokyo. I’m really looking forward to the next Golden Week! Really glad I took those two little days off for 9 days of pleasure! Haha, just wanted to add a bit of sugar to your article. But at the end, I’m traveling by car, and I guess it really helps a lot.
Hey Jordy,
Yeah, I guess it was bad luck this year… Last year I didn’t have any problems, neither in Kyushu nor in Shikoku. This year I got hit by the whole ugliness Golden Week can be.
Mate, Golden Week sucks for any idiot who does not own a motorcycle and a one man tent/air mattress/sleeping bag. Its cheaper than the train, you dont get stuck in traffic and can go so many places others, including car owners cant. When you are done for the day, go somewhere to eat, find and onsen then after dark, pitch your tent in a park, beach, feild, forest or on the side of the road (in the countryside). I have done it many times with no problems. Just get up at the crack of dawn and pack up again.
Gosh, all those poor millions of idiots who don’t own a motorcycle in Japan…
Also I doubt that going long distance on a motorbike is cheaper than using the train, given the insanely high highway fees. And it’s not faster for sure, given the ridiculous speed limits. But going to places off the beaten tracks is an advantage indeed, so is camping wherever you want.
Been searching for a place to stay this year for the second weekend of Golden Week (9 days in advance). Tried 3 different travel sites and everything is booked in every prefecture of Shikoku and also Okayama. My backup was Hiroshima and there is only 1 hotel left, double the price for each day (1.2 man a night for a shitty business hotel).
My frustration led me to search “Golden Week sucks!” on Google and I came up with this article haha. I love to take random holidays and its amazing if you just take off a random weekday, how dead everything is in Japan outside cities. Everyone in this country takes off the exact same days, so no matter where you go on these “holidays”, its Tokyo level crowded…
Yeah, Golden Week is the worst time to travel in Japan. It’s even worse than hanami season, when all the couch potatoes clog up the trains because social pressure demands to leave the house…
This year I won’t even try to travel within Japan and go overseas instead. Insanely expensive, too, but hopefully less crowded.
Hi, I just came across your website and saw some of your pictures of an abandoned theme park, and then found this post. Always nice to see people blogging about their adventures in Kansai (as a European living in Kansai myself, I applaud you).
I’m sorry to hear about your bad experience over in Kyushu. How did you go about it in previous years? Did you book in advance then? I personally would never dream of not booking in advance for GW.
About the Fukuoka tourist information not being helpful…that’s really sad to hear, especially for a city that big. Having said that, I just did a quick google for hotels in Fukuoka and came up with a couple of really big hotel chains, like Hotel Nikko, Hilton, and Grand Hyatt. It wouldn’t be surprising if these were all fully booked during GW when you were there, but there’s no way those big hotels would refuse you for being a foreigner.
Well, stuff like that happens – and I wrote the article in early May, during Golden Week, so I was obviously still angry about it.
Sometimes I book hotels for Golden Week, sometimes I don’t. This year I went to *Hachijojima* and had an accommodation for the first night, but it wasn’t much of a problem to book two more nights at a different place via the local tourist information. For the second half of GW I went to *Tohoku* with friends and without booking hotels. We had to call about a dozen hotels each night on short notice, but we always found a place to stay, nothing was too much out of the way. Usually there are some short notice cancellations you can take advantage of, but I guess I was out of luck in Fukuoka – and the tourist information there was clearly stressed out and annoyed. Like they say here all the time: shoganai, there’s nothing you can do…
Thanks for the reply.
Good to hear it went better after that. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that you would rather stay in Japanese style hotels, or ryokans when you travel. If that’s the case, that’s fine. I would personally stay in hotel chains so as to avoid the hassle of discrimination.
No idea why this 8 year old post popped up for me, but it was an interesting read.
I do agree with many of the points you have brought up, from the perspective of working in Japan – especially so as somebody not originally from there – the negative bear even heavier. I did travel many times during GW and hated it every single time. SW is a close second closely followed by obon. It got a bit better since I had a family in Akita to visit, but being around Tokyo or traveling around didn’t change a bit.
For some time I was very lucky to work in a company, that didn’t require me to take the days off. Actual the opposite, they would encourage me not to since they also ran an Onsen next door and would need every helping hand, even from the office staff. Indeed, the GW itself was very busy with little time to breath, since, as you say, the few places that are actually open (and would even cater to lunch or dinner needs) get sprawled times over by people staying at home. Because of this reason it went by rather quickly though, and I got the whole week off afterwards, which was heaven. The travel expenses were back to normal, and the hotels and ryokan offered 70%, some even 80% or more discount on their rooms. I stayed in Kyoto near the JR station for $35 in a room that would usually go for almost $200, Kurashiki was even cheaper than that and the best thing was the sights were almost empty so we felt like having all the time in the world. For that reason, I loved GW. I do understand however, it is not a viable or even possible option for most people, though. The weird thing was, and there you get your racist card back once again, they would only offer these extreme discounts when booking in Japanese. The English sites also had discounts, but not as high.
It has been a long time since you posted this, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to have an update about your situation in Japan. Are you still living and working there? Were you able to improve your Japanese skills in the meantime and did you find people you would consider real friends?
Best regards
Hey Joga,
Thanks a lot for your comment, a very interesting read!
I am still living and working in Japan, and my Japanese skills have only slightly improved – I understand a bit more, but still don’t speak the language fluently. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like in The 13th Warrior, just sitting around and listening. Also, I’m speaking a foreign language all day… and my life is pretty busy overall, so learning Japanese at this point doesn’t have a super high priority after years of failing.
As for friends… in the American sense, sure. In the German meaning of the word – probably not. People in Japan are too self-centered and too unreliable in my experience. Other people may have made different experiences and quite a bit is probably due to the general way people communicate these days, but what has become internationally known as ghosting since then has ever been a normal way of (not) communicating here in Japan at least since I moved here. Which is especially bad since so many people here tend to be unreliable, so you can never be sure if somebody ghosts you or if they are just the kind of person that takes four to six weeks to answer a text message…