Rebecca Engel
Spring gets all the attention in Japan, and it lasts about a week. The cherry blossoms open, the whole country photographs them at the same time, and then they’re gone. Autumn does the same job at a completely different pace.
The colour starts in the mountains of Hokkaido in the middle of September and doesn’t reach Kyoto until the last week of November, so there’s nearly three months of it moving slowly down the map. These are nineteen things to do in Japan in autumn, from the first slopes turning gold in the far north to deep fried maple leaves sold on a path outside Osaka, with a note on when each one actually peaks.
1. Cross The Tsutenkyo Bridge At Tofuku-ji
Tofuku-ji is the one people mean when they talk about autumn in Kyoto. A covered wooden walkway called the Tsutenkyo runs out across a valley holding around two thousand maples, and from the middle of it the trees below turn into a solid ceiling of red.
The name translates as something close to bridge to heaven, which sounds like marketing until you’re standing on it.
The catch is that everyone else knows. The temple opens at half past eight during the autumn season, and the difference between arriving then and arriving at eleven is enormous. Admission goes up during the peak weeks as well, so carry cash.
Peak here is usually the last week of November into the first few days of December.
2. Ride The Irohazaka Switchbacks Down To Kegon Falls
Irohazaka is a pair of one way mountain roads above Nikko, and between them they have forty eight hairpin bends. Each one is marked with a character from an old Japanese alphabet poem that happens to have forty eight syllables, which is where the road gets its name.
Partway up there’s a lookout called Akechidaira, where a short ropeway lifts you to a platform with Lake Chuzenji on one side, Kegon Falls dropping ninety seven metres below, and Mount Nantai standing behind the whole thing.
Nikko turns in stages, stacked by height. The high ground around the lake goes first in the middle of October, and the shrines down in the town don’t follow until early November, so two visits a fortnight apart show you two different places.
Go on a weekday if you can. The traffic on those bends in late October is genuinely famous, and not in a good way.
3. See The Maples Lit Up After Dark At Eikan-do
Eikan-do has been known as the temple of the maples for centuries, and it has around three thousand of them on a hillside near the southern end of the Philosopher’s Path.
In the second half of November it opens again after dark and lights the entire slope. There’s a pond at the bottom that doubles everything, and a pagoda up the hill you can climb to for a view back over the lit trees with the city behind them.
The evening visit is ticketed separately from the daytime one and it gets busy. It’s still the night illumination most people put first in Kyoto.
4. Ride The Sagano Romantic Train Through Hozukyo Gorge
The Sagano Romantic Train is an old fashioned open sided train that runs about four miles along the Hozugawa river between Arashiyama and Kameoka. It takes twenty five minutes and it’s slow on purpose.
Roughly a thousand maples line the gorge, and because the track sits above the water you’re looking down into the colour rather than through it. The open sided carriages are the ones to book.
From the middle of October they light sections of the route after dark, so the same ride does something completely different in the evening. Peak is mid November into early December, and the good seats go early.
5. Walk The Momiji Kairo At Lake Kawaguchi
Momiji Kairo means maple corridor. It’s a short avenue of maples along a stream running into Lake Kawaguchi, with Mount Fuji sitting behind it, and on a clear morning it’s the postcard.
The festival around it runs the whole of November. Food stalls line the water, there’s a craft market, and the trees are lit from sunset until ten at night.
Autumn is also when Fuji is most likely to actually be out. The mountain hides in haze for much of the summer, so the odds of getting it in the photo are far better now than they were in August.
6. Walk The Ginkgo Tunnel At Meiji Jingu Gaien
This is a straight three hundred metre avenue in central Tokyo with a hundred and forty six ginkgo trees down both sides. When they turn, the whole street goes the same shade of yellow at once and the pavement disappears underneath it.
It’s the outer garden rather than the shrine of the same name, and the two sit a couple of miles apart, so don’t let the map confuse you.
The ginkgo festival runs from the middle of November into the first days of December, with food stalls at the far end, and for about a week the trees are lit in the evening.
It’s free, it’s minutes from a station, and it’s the easiest thing here to drop into an ordinary Tokyo day. It’s also a completely different colour from everywhere else on this list, which is half the reason to go.
7. Take The Bus Into Kamikochi Before The Road Closes
Kamikochi is a high valley in the Northern Alps, and private cars aren’t allowed in. You park below and take a bus up, which is a large part of why it stays as quiet as it does.
The larches turn gold from around the twenty fifth of October into the first days of November, and by then the peaks above have usually taken their first snow. Gold trees, white tops, and a river the colour of glass running through the middle of it.
The valley closes on the fifteenth of November every year and doesn’t reopen until April. That isn’t weather dependent, it’s simply the date, so the window is narrow and it doesn’t move.
The flat walk along the river from Kappa Bridge takes an hour or two and needs no equipment at all.
8. Stand Under The Lights At Korankei Valley
Korankei is a gorge about an hour from Nagoya with more than four thousand maples in eleven different varieties, which is why the colour there arrives in layers instead of one flat red.
A priest from the temple at the top planted the first of them in the sixteen hundreds and the town has been adding to them ever since.
The festival runs through November and the hillside is lit every evening until nine, with food stalls along the river below. The walk over the bridge and up through the trees takes about an hour.
It’s the closest thing on this list to a proper night out, and it’s the one to pick if you want the crowds to feel like part of the atmosphere rather than a problem.
9. Catch Japan’s First Autumn Colour At Daisetsuzan
Autumn in Japan starts here. Daisetsuzan is an enormous national park in central Hokkaido, and the colour arrives in the middle of September, roughly two months before Kyoto.
The quickest way in is the ropeway up Asahidake, the tallest mountain in Hokkaido. It puts you onto a boardwalk loop past steam vents and small ponds, with the slopes below already turning.
Peak is usually somewhere between the fifteenth and the twenty fifth of September and it doesn’t last long. Take a proper jacket, because it can be close to freezing up there while Tokyo is still running its air conditioning.
10. Walk The Stream Path Through Oirase Gorge
The Oirase stream runs out of Lake Towada in Aomori, and a footpath follows it for about nine miles through the trees. It’s flat, it’s well built, and in late October it’s one of the best walks in the country.
The stream does most of the work. It drops over mossy rocks the whole way with small waterfalls coming in from the sides, and in autumn the canopy above turns while the moss underneath stays green.
You don’t have to walk the full length. Buses run the road alongside it and stop at several points, so you can do a two or three mile section and ride the rest.
11. Ride The Kurobe Gorge Railway
This line was built to service a dam. It’s a narrow gauge railway running twelve miles up a gorge in Toyama, from Unazuki to Keyakidaira, on trains small enough that adults sit with their knees up.
Most carriages are open sided with no windows and plain bench seats, which is cold and completely worth it. The walls of the gorge rise on both sides and the trip takes about eighty minutes each way.
The colour holds from the middle of October to the middle of November, a longer run than most places get, because the line climbs so much that different heights turn at different times. The railway shuts for the winter at the end of November.
12. See The Kochia Turn Red At Hitachi Seaside Park
Kochia are round bushes, roughly knee to waist high, and there are about forty thousand of them planted across a hill in this park in Ibaraki. In summer they’re green. In October they go scarlet, all of them, at the same time.
Seen from the bottom of the hill it reads as a red carpet with a path cut through it, and it looks nothing like anywhere else here. There isn’t a maple involved.
They start changing in early October and peak in the middle of the month, then soften to gold by the end of it. The park is about ninety minutes from Tokyo and works easily as a day out.
13. Eat Deep Fried Maple Leaves At Minoo Falls
Minoo is a wooded valley just north of Osaka with a thirty three metre waterfall at the end of it. The walk in from the station is about two miles, paved the whole way, and lined with maples.
Along that path, shops sell momiji tempura. Actual maple leaves, salted and stored for a year, then dipped in a sweet batter and fried while you wait. They arrive in a paper bag and taste closer to a biscuit than a leaf.
It’s the sort of thing that sounds like a gimmick invented for tourists and turns out to be a genuinely old local tradition. The valley peaks in the second half of November.
14. Watch The Floats Roll Through Takayama
Takayama holds two festivals a year, and the autumn one runs on the ninth and tenth of October, always those dates. It belongs to the Hachiman shrine in the northern half of the old town.
Eleven yatai come out for it. They’re tall lacquered wooden floats, some with mechanical puppets working on top, and the same neighbourhoods have looked after them for generations.
The part worth staying for is the evening of the ninth, when the floats are hung with around a hundred lanterns each and pulled through the streets in the dark.
Book a room months ahead. The town is small, the dates never move, and it fills.
15. Hike Mount Takao On A Weekday
Mount Takao is an hour from central Tokyo on an ordinary train, which makes it far and away the most accessible mountain in this article. There’s a cable car and a chairlift covering the lower half if you’d rather not walk it.
From the top of the lift it’s about forty minutes on foot to the summit, past a temple complex and a viewing platform called Kasumidai. On a clear day you can see Mount Fuji from the top.
The colour peaks from the middle of November into early December. It’s also often called the most climbed mountain in the world, and a November Sunday is when you’ll believe it, so go midweek if there’s any way to arrange it.
16. See The Maples Around The Danjo Garan On Koyasan
Koyasan is a working temple town on a mountaintop in Wakayama, founded twelve hundred years ago as the centre of Shingon Buddhism. Autumn arrives at the end of October, a good month before Kyoto down below.
The best of the colour sits around the Danjo Garan, the main temple complex, where the maples run up against a huge vermilion pagoda. A path called the Jabara road links it to Kongobu-ji under a low canopy of red.
You can stay the night in a temple. Dozens of them take guests, feed you vegetarian food and let you sit in on the morning service, and doing that is the reason to come here rather than day tripping in.
Okunoin, the cemetery, is the other walk to make. It’s less about the colour and more about two hundred thousand gravestones standing under enormous cedars.
17. See The Autumn Colours At Kenroku-en
Kenroku-en in Kanazawa is one of the three great gardens of Japan, and the argument for going in autumn rather than spring is simply that it’s quieter.
The colour starts in the middle of October and peaks around the middle of November. It’s a strolling garden, built to be walked in a loop past ponds and bridges and a very old teahouse rather than looked at from one spot.
For a short stretch in November they light it in the evenings. On the first of the month the gardeners also start raising the yukitsuri, rope cones strung from tall poles to hold the pine branches up under the coming snow, and watching that go up is worth the visit on its own.
18. Wander Rikugien Before The Crowds
Rikugien is a walled garden in northern Tokyo, built three hundred years ago around a central pond, and it holds the best autumn colour inside the city.
The maples are concentrated at the far end past the water, in a small wooded valley that feels a long way from the nearest train line. The whole garden is small enough to do properly in an hour.
From late November into early December it opens in the evening and lights the trees, which needs a separate ticket bought in advance. If you’d rather skip that entirely, the garden opens at nine in the morning and the first hour is close to empty.
19. Eat Sanma And Matsutake While They’re In Season
Autumn has its own menu in Japan, and this is the one thing on the list you can do anywhere, on any day of the trip. Restaurants change over in September and the specials board tells you the season has turned.
Sanma is the one to order first. It’s a long silver fish, grilled whole over salt and served with grated radish and a wedge of citrus, and it’s at its fattiest between September and November.
Matsutake mushrooms are the expensive end. They come out of the pine forests in September and October and cost a fortune, but a small amount in a clear broth is enough to understand the fuss.
Then there’s shinmai, the first rice of the harvest, glossier and softer than the rest of the year’s and gone by December. Add chestnuts and persimmons and most of the season is on one table.
More Things To Do In Japan In Autumn
A few more worth the detour if the trip runs long, but that didn’t need a numbered slot of their own.
Kyoto runs the Jidai Matsuri on the twenty second of October, a costume procession walking twelve hundred years of the city’s history from the old palace to a shrine. The same night, up in the hills at Kurama, a fire festival carries burning torches down through the village.
Miyajima has a small maple valley behind the shrine called Momijidani, which is a good addition if you’re already going for the torii gate. Naruko Gorge in Miyagi is one view rather than a day out, but it’s a famous one.
And Shirakawa-go, the thatched village most people photograph under snow, is quieter in late October with the rice fields cut and the hills behind it starting to turn.
When The Autumn Colours Peak In Japan
Autumn moves from north to south and from high ground down to low, and understanding that is the whole trick to planning around it.
The middle of September is Hokkaido, and Daisetsuzan is the first place in the country to turn. October belongs to the mountains, so the Alps, the high ground at Nikko, and the gorges in Tohoku and Toyama. Late November into the first week of December is when Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka finally go, and Kyushu carries on into the middle of December.
That spread is the reason autumn is easier to plan around than spring. Cherry blossom gives you roughly a week in any one place and you’re gambling on hitting it. Autumn gives you two or three weeks per region, and nearly three months across the country as a whole.
Forecasts get published from around the start of September and updated as the season goes on. A warm autumn can push the colour back by a fortnight, so check one a few weeks out rather than booking on last year’s dates.
Final Thoughts
Nobody does all nineteen of these in one trip, and there’s no reason to try. They run from the top of Hokkaido down to a mountaintop in Wakayama, and the ones in the far north have finished before the ones in Kyoto have started.
So work backwards from the dates. Pick the fortnight you can travel, look at what’s turning then, and build the trip around that instead of choosing the places first.
One garden, one gorge with a small train running up it, one night illumination and a lot of grilled fish makes a very good two weeks. The best things to do in Japan in autumn tend to be the slow ones anyway.
