Why shoulder season is the only way to do Japan

What peak season actually costs you

The first ten days of April in Japan are the most oversubscribed dates in the entire Asian travel calendar. Room rates in Kyoto run two to three times their annual median. The Philosopher's Path is shoulder to shoulder from seven in the morning. Restaurant reservations that would ordinarily take a week take three months, and the shinkansen you wanted is booked.

You're also gambling. Blossom is a two-week phenomenon that moves by up to ten days year to year, and the forecast firms up around three weeks out — long after your non-refundable flights are booked. We've had clients pay peak rates for bare branches. That's not a rare outcome; it's a coin flip.

The case for late May

Late May is our single most-recommended window for a first Japan trip, and almost nobody asks for it.

• The weather is the best it gets. Warm enough for shirtsleeves, before the June rains arrive. Genuinely comfortable walking weather in Kyoto, which matters more than people expect on a temple-heavy itinerary.
• The gardens are at their peak. Everyone photographs Japan's gardens in blossom or in autumn. In late May they're in full deep green, the moss is at its best, and the irises are out at Heian-jingū. It's arguably the better garden season and it's completely unfashionable.
• The room rates collapse. Golden Week ends in the first week of May and the market falls off a cliff. The same ryokan that wanted ¥90,000 in April will take ¥38,000 in late May.
• You can actually get in. Reservations, rail seats, the good sushi counter — all available at a week's notice instead of a season's.

The case for early November

Autumn colour peaks in Kyoto in the last ten days of November, and that fortnight has become its own mini-peak — crowded and expensive, if not quite April. The first two weeks of November, though, are a different proposition entirely: crisp, clear, the colour just beginning in the hills around Nikkō and Hakone, and the city still normal.

If you want the famous Kyoto autumn photograph, you need late November and you'll pay for it. If you want a superb trip in beautiful weather, take the first fortnight and be a week early. Almost nobody regrets this.

Clients book April because it's the Japan they've seen photographs of. They come back from late May and tell us it's the Japan they'd actually wanted.

Tiago Fonseca, Asia & Pacific Product Manager

The windows to avoid outright

• Golden Week (late April to early May). The entire country travels at once. Domestic rates spike, trains fill, and much of what you want to see is closed or heaving.
• Obon (mid-August). Same phenomenon, plus 35°C and humidity that makes Kyoto genuinely unpleasant to walk in.
• New Year (28 December to 4 January). A lot of Japan simply shuts. It's a fascinating time to be there if you know what you're doing, and a frustrating one if you don't.

What we'd book

Twelve nights, late May: three in Tokyo, two in a Hakone ryokan with a private onsen and a Fuji view, four in Kyoto in a machiya townhouse, one in Osaka for the food, and two spare — deliberately unbooked, because the best day of a Japan trip is usually the one nobody planned.

That's more or less our Japan: Neon & Nature itinerary, and we run it in late May more often than any other week of the year.