Rebecca Engel
Most people plan a trip to Japan around the cherry blossoms, and then spend that trip in a crowd. Spring is lovely and it’s also the most expensive, most booked out, most photographed few weeks of the year. Winter is the season almost nobody puts first, which is exactly why it’s worth putting first.
Here’s the thing about Japan in winter. It isn’t spring with colder weather and fewer people. It’s a completely different set of things to do in Japan, most of which physically cannot happen in April. Ice floes drift down from Siberia. Whole villages get lit up under two metres of snow. Trees on a mountain in Yamagata freeze into shapes with their own nickname. These are the seventeen worth building a trip around, and every one of them disappears when the snow does.
1. Walk Between The Snow Sculptures At The Sapporo Snow Festival
For about a week in early February, Odori Park in central Sapporo fills up with snow sculptures the size of buildings. Not snowmen. Full facades of temples and castles, carved by teams working through the night.
It started in 1950 when a handful of local students built six snow statues in the park. Around two million people now come every year, which tells you how far that got away from them.
There are three sites and they’re worth splitting up. Odori has the giant sculptures, Susukino does ice rather than snow and looks better after dark, and Tsudome is the one with the slides and tubing if anyone in the group is under twelve.
Book a Sapporo hotel the moment your dates are set. This is the busiest week of Hokkaido’s year and prices know it.
2. Watch The Snow Monkeys Get In The Bath At Jigokudani
Jigokudani Yaen Koen sits in a steep valley in Nagano, and the Japanese macaques that live there come down off the cliffs to sit in a hot spring pool. It’s the single most recognisable image of winter in Japan and it’s real.
You reach it on foot, about a mile through cedar forest from the car park. The path is flat but packed with ice, so this is a proper shoes day.
The monkeys are there year round, but they only get in the water when they’re cold. Come in July and you’ll watch a group of macaques sitting on dry rocks looking unbothered, which is not the photo anyone travels for.
Pair it with a night in Shibu Onsen down the hill. It’s a tiny old hot spring town with nine public bathhouses and stone streets, and it’s fifteen minutes away.
3. Ride An Icebreaker Through The Drift Ice At Abashiri
Every winter, ice forms where the Amur River meets the Sea of Okhotsk and drifts south until it reaches the top of Hokkaido. Abashiri is the furthest south that drift ice reliably arrives anywhere in the northern hemisphere.
The Aurora icebreaker runs out of Abashiri harbour from late January into March and pushes straight through it. You feel the floes break under the hull, which is a strange thing to feel on a boat.
Seals turn up on the ice fairly often and sea eagles sit on it looking enormous. Bring a lens if you care about that sort of photo.
There’s no ice in a warm year, so check the ice forecast before you commit to the trip. February is the safest bet.
4. See Shirakawa Go Lit Up Under Deep Snow
Shirakawa Go is a village of steep thatched farmhouses in the Gifu mountains, built with roofs at that angle for a reason. The snow here comes in metres, not centimetres.
On a handful of evenings in January and February, the village turns on floodlights and the whole valley glows. It’s the picture on the front of half the guidebooks to Japan.
The light up needs booking well ahead now, and it’s a lottery in practice. Places sell out months out, so treat it as the fixed point you plan the rest of the trip around rather than a nice extra.
If you miss the light up nights, go anyway in daylight. Snow to the windowsills and steam coming off the roofs is worth the bus by itself.
5. Stand Among The Snow Monsters At Zao
On the mountain above Zao Onsen in Yamagata, wet wind off the Sea of Japan hits the fir trees and freezes onto them layer after layer. By February the trees have vanished inside lumps of ice and snow that look like a crowd walking uphill.
The locals call them juhyo, which translates as ice trees. Everyone else calls them snow monsters, and once you’ve seen one you’ll understand why that name won.
A ropeway takes you up into the middle of them. On selected evenings they light the whole field in colour, which is either magical or deeply unsettling depending on your mood.
They only exist for a few weeks. Too early and the trees are just snowy, too late and they’ve started to slump.
6. Ski The Powder At Niseko
Niseko gets somewhere near fifty feet of snow in a season, and it falls dry and light because of where the storms come from. Skiers spend years talking about it in a slightly religious way.
Four linked resorts sit around Mount Annupuri and one lift pass covers the lot. There’s night skiing under lights until eight or nine, which is the part people don’t expect.
It’s the most international place in Hokkaido by a distance, so English gets you a long way and the food scene is far better than a ski town has any right to have.
If Niseko is booked or over budget, Hakuba in Nagano and Furano back in Hokkaido are the two obvious swaps.
7. Follow The Candles Along The Otaru Snow Light Path
Otaru is a port town forty minutes from Sapporo with a canal, old stone warehouses and a lot of glass workshops. For about ten days in February, the whole place gets lit by candles.
Volunteers pack snow into small lanterns and float glass balls with candles inside along the canal. There’s a second stretch along a disused railway line that’s quieter and better.
It runs at the same time as the Sapporo festival, so most people do both. Come in the evening and stay for dinner, since Otaru sushi is a genuine reason to be here.
Wear boots with grip. The paths get walked into ice and the canal edge has no railing in places.
8. Watch The Gas Lamps Come On At Ginzan Onsen
Ginzan Onsen is a row of wooden inns three and four storeys tall, facing each other across a river in the Yamagata mountains. They went up in the 1920s and nothing much has changed since.
At dusk the gas lamps along the street come on, and if there’s snow falling it stops looking like a real place. This is the one on every Japan winter mood board, and it earns it.
Day visitors now park outside the village and take a shuttle in during peak season, because the street simply cannot hold the cars. Staying the night is much better anyway, since the crowd thins out after four and the lamps are the whole point.
Book a ryokan here months ahead. There are only a dozen or so and they fill first.
9. Catch The Penguin Walk At Asahiyama Zoo
Asahiyama Zoo in Hokkaido lets its king penguins out for a walk twice a day through the winter. They go in a line down a snow path with the crowd on either side, at their own pace, ignoring everyone.
It isn’t a gimmick. The birds need the exercise or they put on weight standing around, so the walk only happens when there’s enough snow on the ground for it.
That’s roughly mid December to mid March. Outside those months there’s no walk at all, which makes this one of the clearest examples of a thing to do in Japan that winter simply hands you.
The zoo is in Asahikawa, about ninety minutes from Sapporo by train, and works well on the same trip as a night in Furano.
10. Join The New Year Crowd At Meiji Jingu
Hatsumode is the first shrine visit of the new year, and it’s the biggest thing that happens in Japan all year. Meiji Jingu in Tokyo takes around three million people across the first three days of January, more than anywhere else in the country.
You shuffle up the gravel approach under the trees in a slow river of people, throw a coin, clap twice, and ask for a decent year. Then you buy an arrow or a charm and eat something hot from a stall.
It is genuinely crowded and that’s the experience, not a flaw in it. If a three million person queue sounds like too much, go on the fourth or fifth instead when it’s calm and the stalls are still up.
This is also the week to know that much of Japan shuts. Small restaurants and family shops close from around the 29th to the 3rd.
11. Sit Inside A Snow Hut At The Yokote Kamakura Festival
In Yokote up in Akita, they build snow huts about the height of a person and put a small altar to the water god inside each one. This has been going on for something like 450 years.
It happens on the 15th and 16th of February. Children sit inside the huts with a charcoal brazier and invite you in for sweet amazake and grilled rice cakes, which is a very hard invitation to turn down.
Down by the riverbank there are hundreds of miniature huts with a single candle in each. From the bridge above they look like a field of small orange lights in the dark.
Yokote is a way off the usual route and that’s part of why it’s still good. Take the shinkansen to Omagari and change.
12. Walk The Winter Illuminations In Tokyo
From the middle of November, Tokyo starts wiring up entire streets with lights, and a few of them are worth crossing the city for. Keyakizaka in Roppongi is the famous one, because the slope lines up with Tokyo Tower glowing at the bottom of it.
Naka Dori in Marunouchi does something quieter and better. A long avenue of trees in warm champagne light, office workers walking home through it, no theme and no music.
Shibuya runs a tunnel of blue lights along the park street that’s much busier and much sillier, and worth twenty minutes if you’re nearby.
Most of them switch off around Christmas or early January, though a few run into February. They’re free, they’re outside, and they’re only there in winter.
13. Eat Snow Crab In Kinosaki Onsen
Snow crab season on the Sea of Japan coast opens in November and closes in March, and the whole coast rearranges itself around it. Kinosaki Onsen in Hyogo is the best place to be while it’s happening.
The town is a willow lined street along a canal with seven public bathhouses on it. Guests wander between them in a yukata and wooden sandals, clacking along in the cold, which nobody seems to find odd.
Dinner at your inn is the crab, done four or five ways in a row. Raw, grilled, in a hot pot, then the rice cooked in what’s left, and by the end you’ll have had enough crab for a year.
It costs what it costs. Local matsuba crab is graded and tagged and the good ones are eye watering, but this is one of the few things in Japan with a hard season and no substitute.
14. Watch The Village Burn A Shrine At Nozawa Onsen
Every year on the 15th of January, the village of Nozawa Onsen in Nagano builds a wooden shrine, and then the men of the village defend it from everyone else, who attack with burning torches.
The defenders are the men turning 25 and 42, the two unlucky ages in Japan. They sit on the structure and beat back the torches with pine branches while the whole village watches and drinks sake.
It goes on for hours, gets steadily more chaotic, and ends with the shrine going up in one enormous fire. It’s counted as one of the three great fire festivals in the country and it is not a tidy, roped off event.
Stand back further than you think you need to. Sparks travel and the snow underfoot gets churned into something treacherous.
15. Soak Outdoors In The Snow At Nyuto Onsen
There’s no version of this that works in August. Sitting in an outdoor hot spring bath while snow lands on your head is the whole reason a lot of people come to Japan in winter.
Nyuto Onsen in Akita is a scatter of old inns spread through beech forest, and Tsurunoyu is the one people picture. Thatched roof, milky white water you can’t see your own knees through, snow banked up around the edge of the bath.
The trick is that the water is hot enough that the cold air feels good rather than punishing. Your shoulders are freezing, the rest of you is at forty degrees, and it’s a strange and excellent way to spend an hour.
Most of these inns take day visitors for a small fee if you can’t get a room. Go early, because the good ones cap numbers.
16. Taste The Season’s First Sake In Nada
Sake has always been brewed in the cold. Winter is when the breweries actually run, and the fresh unpasteurised stuff that comes out in January and February never leaves Japan.
Nada in Kobe is the biggest sake district in the country and several of the old breweries sit within a walk of each other, with free museums and tastings at the end. Fushimi in southern Kyoto is the other one worth a morning.
Look for a ball of cedar branches hanging over a brewery door. It goes up green when the new sake is ready and browns as the season goes on, which is how the town used to know without asking.
Ask for shiboritate if you want the just pressed one. It’s cloudier, sharper and a bit livelier than anything you’ll get at home.
17. Throw Beans At The Setsubun Festival
Setsubun lands on the 3rd of February and marks the end of winter on the old calendar. The custom is to throw roasted soybeans at a demon while shouting at it to get out and let some luck in.
Households do a small version of this at home with someone in a paper mask. Shrines do a much larger one, and Yoshida Shrine in Kyoto is the big one, with hundreds of food stalls up the hill and a huge fire ritual after dark.
In Tokyo, Senso Ji throws beans from a platform into a crowd of thousands. Some shrines get sumo wrestlers and television actors to do the throwing, and people go home genuinely pleased to have caught a bean.
You’re also supposed to eat one bean for each year you’ve been alive and a whole uncut sushi roll in silence, facing a lucky direction that changes annually. Nobody will mind if you skip that part.
More Things To Do In Japan In Winter
A few more that didn’t need a numbered slot but are worth the detour if the trip runs long.
The red crowned cranes gather at Tsurui in eastern Hokkaido from December to March and dance in the snow, which is as close to a wildlife documentary as most trips get. Sounkyo, further inland, freezes its waterfalls and lights the ice up at night.
Lake Kawaguchi runs fireworks on winter weekends with Mount Fuji behind them, and winter is the season Fuji is actually out rather than hiding in haze. Kusatsu in Gunma is worth a night for the steaming hot water channels running down the middle of town under snow.
And if all seventeen of these feel like a lot of travelling, Hakuba in Nagano puts skiing, monkeys and old post towns within an hour of each other.
What To Know Before A Winter Trip To Japan
Winter in Japan is not one climate. Tokyo and Kyoto get cold, bright and mostly dry with the odd snowfall, while the far side of the country buries itself. Two cities six hours apart can be having completely different weather, so pack for both.
The dates that matter are the last few days of December through the 3rd of January. Trains run and big attractions stay open, but small restaurants and family run shops close and some towns go quiet. Plan that stretch around cities rather than countryside.
The festivals in this list are single days or single weeks and they don’t move. Nozawa is always the 15th of January, Yokote is always the 15th and 16th of February, Setsubun is the 3rd. Build the trip around the ones you care about and fill in the rest afterwards.
For clothes, layers beat a heavy coat, because every train, shop and restaurant is heated to an aggressive degree. Bring boots with real grip for the ice, and buy a box of the stick on heat pads from any convenience store, since they’re cheap and they change your day.
Final Thoughts
The case for going in winter is simple. Everything on this list is either gone or unrecognisable by April, the flights and hotels cost less, and the queue at the places everyone photographs is a fraction of what it is in spring.
You do have to travel for a lot of it. The best things to do in Japan in winter are spread from Hokkaido down to the Sea of Japan coast, and nobody is doing all seventeen in one trip.
So pick a region and let the season do the rest. One festival, one hot spring town with snow on the roof, and one long train ride watching the country turn white through the window is a genuinely great week.
