Japan in May opens with Golden Week, and once the holidays end the month belongs to the green season, shinryoku: the rice is being planted in flooded fields, the maples are in new leaf, and the evenings are warm enough to eat outside. In Hokkaido, a month behind the rest of Japan, the cherry trees are only now in flower.
golden week
Golden Week and Children's Day
Golden Week is four national holidays placed close together: Showa Day on 29 April, then Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day and Children's Day on 3, 4 and 5 May. The last of them is the one that shows. For weeks beforehand, koinobori, streamers in the shape of carp, fly from poles over homes and rivers, a black carp for the father, a red for the mother and a smaller one for each child, because the carp swims upstream and the family wants the same strength for its children. On 5 May the confectioners sell kashiwa-mochi, rice cakes filled with bean paste and wrapped in an oak leaf, and the bathhouses float bundles of iris leaves in the water, shobu-yu, whose sharp green scent is meant to keep the bathers well.
kyoto
The green season in Kyoto
The maples Kyoto is famous for in November are in new leaf in May, so pale that the light in the temple gardens turns green. At Tofuku-ji the valley below the Tsutenkyo Bridge is a single sheet of it, seen from the covered bridge as if from a balcony.
On 15 May the Aoi Matsuri leaves the Kyoto Imperial Palace: some five hundred people in the dress of the Heian court walk to the shrines at Shimogamo and Kamigamo, with an ox-drawn carriage hung with wisteria and the Saio-dai, a young woman of the city chosen each year to play the imperial princess who once served the shrines, carried in a palanquin in twelve layers of silk.
From 1 May the restaurants along the west bank of the Kamo river build their wooden platforms, the noryo-yuka, out over the water, and dinner is taken there in the open air until the middle of October. In Pontocho, the lane behind those restaurants, the geiko and maiko dance the Kamogawa Odori through most of the month, the last of the city's spring dances. On the third Sunday of May, at Arashiyama, the Mifune Matsuri of Kurumazaki Shrine puts the court back on the water: boats in the style of the Heian period drift on the Oi river below the Togetsukyo Bridge, carrying musicians, dancers and poets.
uji
The first tea and the wisteria at Uji
The tea growers count the start of the picking from the old calendar. Hachijuhachiya, the eighty-eighth night after the first day of spring, falls on the first or second of May, and the leaf picked around it is counted the best of the year. The new tea, shincha, is sold in Uji through May, with a green, grassy sweetness that the later leaf does not have. At Byodo-in, the Phoenix Hall on the same river, the wisteria on the trellis beside the pond flowers in the last days of April and the first of May, long pale purple racemes hanging over the water.
tokyo
Tokyo's great shrine festivals
Tokyo's two great festivals of the Edo period fall in May. The Kanda Matsuri of Kanda Myojin, staged in full in odd-numbered years, 2027 among them, sends a procession in court costume through Akihabara, Nihonbashi and Otemachi in the middle of the month. On the third weekend the Sanja Matsuri of Asakusa Shrine carries around a hundred portable shrines, mikoshi, through the lanes beside Senso-ji on the shoulders of the neighbourhood associations, to a sound of chanting and wooden clappers that fills the district for three days.
hokkaido
Cherry blossom in Hokkaido in May
The cherry blossoms reach Hokkaido in the first days of May. At Matsumae, on the southern tip of the island, the castle stands among some ten thousand cherry trees of about two hundred and fifty varieties, some pale, some the deep pink of the northern Ezo-yamazakura. In Hakodate around sixteen hundred trees line the moats of the star-shaped fort at Goryokaku, and from the observation tower beside it the whole five-pointed star is outlined in pink.
At the table, May belongs to the first bonito, hatsu-gatsuo, running north up the Pacific coast. In Kochi on Shikoku it is seared over a fire of rice straw, warayaki, until the skin blackens and smokes, then sliced thick and eaten with raw garlic and salt.
the weather
May weather: warm, before the humidity
May is warm without the humidity that comes in June. An afternoon in Tokyo averages 23.6°C (74°F) in May and an evening 14.6°C (58°F), and Kyoto's afternoons are a degree and a half warmer, at 25.1°C (77°F), in the Meteorological Agency's thirty-year record. In Sapporo, where the blossom is out, days reach 17.9°C (64°F) and nights fall to 9°C (48°F).
the calendar
Golden Week, and the weeks after it
Golden Week is the busiest week of the year for travel inside Japan: the shinkansen and domestic flights fill, and many small family restaurants close for the week while their owners take their own holiday. After 6 May the country goes back to work, and the warm, dry weeks before the June rains begin.
the journey
A Hokkaido cherry blossom tour into May
The Cherry Blossom Tour of Hokkaido, from 28 April to 10 May 2027, opens in the far south of the island, at Lake Onuma beneath the volcano Komagatake. At Matsumae a hanami picnic is laid on rugs inside the castle park, a fine bento and cold sake beneath the castle wall with the Tsugaru Strait behind, and a day in old Hakodate takes in the morning market, the hillside lanes of Motomachi, Goryokaku and one of Japan's three great night views. It ends in Sapporo, with a second picnic in Moerenuma Park, the landscape Isamu Noguchi designed for the city, and a last day of sushi in Otaru and whisky at the Nikka distillery in Yoichi.
The tour is limited to 8 guests, and its Tour Directors travel every mile of it beside them. Kyoto in its green season, Uji in its new tea and Tokyo in its festivals belong to the Custom Tour of Japan, a private journey designed for one party, on its own dates.
