Japan in June is the rainy season, tsuyu, everywhere except Hokkaido. From early June until the middle of July a soft rain falls on many days over Tokyo, Kyoto and the south, and the gardens of Kyoto are at their greenest for it. The word for the season is written with the characters for plum and rain, because it arrives as the plums ripen. Hokkaido has no rainy season, and in the last week of June the lavender on the hills around Furano begins to colour.
kyoto
Kyoto in the rain
Rain suits Kyoto. The moss at Saiho-ji, some hundred and twenty kinds of it spread under the maples around a pond in the shape of the character for heart, is at its deepest green in June. The temple admits visitors only by application, and each one copies a passage of the sutras by brush before the garden is opened to them. Across the city the raked gravel of the Zen gardens darkens in the wet, and every line in it shows sharper for the rain.
At Mimuroto-ji in Uji the wooded valley garden beside the approach has some twenty thousand hydrangeas of about fifty kinds, flowering through the month in blue, white, pink and purple, and in the great pots before the main hall the lotuses begin to open late in June. At Heian Shrine the irises in the garden are in flower in the first half of the month.
In the evenings, along the canal beside the Philosopher's Path and in the stream at Kibune in the hills north of the city, the fireflies come out. At Kibune the restaurants have built their kawadoko, platforms set just above the running water, and dinner is taken there in the cool air of the valley with the stream passing underneath.
the table
Sweetfish, green plums and the summer purification
The ayu season opens on the rivers in June. Ayu, the sweetfish, is grilled whole on a skewer with salt, bent as if still swimming, and eaten head and all, bitter and fragrant, with a green vinegar of water pepper, tade-zu.
It is also the month of the plum harvest. The hard green ume come in from the orchards of Wakayama, where the large Nanko-ume is grown, and households across the country fill glass jars with them: some with rock sugar and clear spirit for umeshu, the plum liqueur that will be ready by winter, and some with salt, to be dried in the sun in July as umeboshi.
On 30 June the shrines of Kyoto set up great rings of woven grass, chinowa, for the summer purification, Nagoshi no Harae, and worshippers pass through them in a figure of eight. The confectioners sell minazuki, a triangle of white sweet topped with red beans, eaten on that day to see the year safely through its second half.
hokkaido
The north has no rainy season
Hokkaido in June is clear, dry and mild. The rice fields around Biei are green, the snow is still on the peaks of the Tokachi range, and the days are long: in Sapporo the sun does not set until after seven in the evening. The city has two festivals in the month. For five days in the first half of June the YOSAKOI Soran fills Odori Park with teams of dancers, hundreds strong, each with its own costume, clappers and a line of the old herring fishermen's song worked into the music. From 14 to 16 June the Hokkaido Shrine festival, the Sapporo Matsuri, carries its portable shrines through the centre and lines Nakajima Park with stalls.
On the Shakotan peninsula, west of Otaru, the sea urchin season opens in June and runs through the summer. The fishermen lean from small boats with glass-bottomed boxes to find the urchins on the rocks below, in water so clear that the bottom shows from the cliffs above, and the uni is served over rice the same day, bright orange and tasting of the cold sea.
the weather
June weather: rain in the south, sun in the north
The contrast is plain in the Meteorological Agency's 1991 to 2020 normals: 167.8 millimetres of rain in Tokyo in June against 60.4 in Sapporo. Tokyo's days reach 26.1°C (79°F) and its nights 18.5°C (65°F), and the air is heavy with the humidity of the season. Kyoto is warmer at 28.1°C and 19.2°C (83°F and 67°F). Sapporo, dry and bright, is at 21.8°C and 13.4°C (71°F and 56°F), the temperature of an English summer.
the calendar
The month without a holiday
June is the one month of the Japanese year with no national holiday. With the schools in term, Golden Week a month behind and the summer holidays a month ahead, it is among the quietest months of the year for travel inside Japan.
the journey
A Hokkaido summer tour that begins in June
The Summer Tour of Hokkaido sets out into this northern June on 25 June 2027 and runs twelve days to 6 July, with a second departure from 11 to 22 July. A day is given to the lavender of Furano, in the older fields away from the farm shop, and a day to the Shakotan coast, where lunch is the morning's sea urchin spooned onto warm rice at a counter run by the family that lands the catch. At Lake Toya the night ends in the onsen on the terrace, with fireworks opening over the caldera, as they do every night of the summer.
The tour is limited to 8 guests, and its Tour Directors travel every mile of it beside them, from the forest at Biei to the counters of Sapporo.