Japan Holiday Calendar

Japan 2026 public holiday guide

Last reviewed 2026-09-23 · Maintained by the site operator

Japan’s national holidays are defined by the Act on National Holidays. Some dates are fixed; others use Happy Monday rules. When a holiday falls on Sunday, a substitute holiday usually follows. Golden Week, Marine Day season, and the year-end/New Year period are the busiest travel windows.

For visitors, Golden Week means scarce seats and higher hotel rates. For business, expect slower replies during Golden Week and Obon (mid-August company leave that is widely observed even though it is not a single nationwide statutory holiday).

Confirm details with Cabinet Office publications when dates affect contracts or travel.

Planning tips

• Golden Week: book transport early.
• Marine Day / Mountain Day: summer travel markers.
• Respect for the Aged Day + Autumnal Equinox: common autumn breaks.
• Culture Day / Labor Thanksgiving Day: short autumn holidays.

Japan 2026 public holiday table

This 2026 view lists 18 public holiday dates for Japan. The earliest entry is 2026-01-01 (New Year's Day, Thu) and the latest is 2026-11-23 (Labor Thanksgiving Day). The longest consecutive block in the dataset is about 4 days (2026-05-03–2026-05-06). The table below is fully readable without JavaScript.

Note: Compiled from public notices for planning. Confirm critical dates with official sources.

Holidays written into an act of the Diet

Japan sets its public holidays through the Act on National Holidays, enacted in 1948. It is a short law that names each holiday, fixes its date and states its purpose in a single clause. Children’s Day, for instance, is defined as a day to respect the character of children and to thank mothers. Changing that list means amending the statute, which means a bill through the Diet. This is why Japan’s holiday calendar barely moves from year to year, and why the two most recent additions, Mountain Day and the renaming of Sports Day, were treated as notable events rather than routine administration.

There are two structural exceptions worth knowing. National Foundation Day is the only holiday whose date is not written into the act itself; the act delegates it to a cabinet order, which designates 11 February. Vernal Equinox Day and Autumnal Equinox Day cannot be fixed at all, because they depend on the moment the sun crosses the equinoctial point. The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan computes them, publishes them in its almanac each February, and the dates for the following year are formally announced in the official gazette. The fact that Vernal Equinox Day 2026 is Friday 20 March was only confirmed in February 2025.

• 1 Jan Thu New Year’s Day, 12 Jan Mon Coming of Age Day
• 11 Feb Wed National Foundation Day, 23 Feb Mon Emperor’s Birthday
• 20 Mar Fri Vernal Equinox Day, 29 Apr Wed Showa Day
• 3 May Sun Constitution Memorial Day, 4 May Mon Greenery Day, 5 May Tue Children’s Day, 6 May Wed substitute holiday
• 20 Jul Mon Marine Day, 11 Aug Tue Mountain Day
• 21 Sep Mon Respect for the Aged Day, 22 Sep Tue citizens’ holiday, 23 Sep Wed Autumnal Equinox Day
• 12 Oct Mon Sports Day, 3 Nov Tue Culture Day, 23 Nov Mon Labor Thanksgiving Day

Why so many Mondays

Amendments in 1998 and 2001 converted four fixed-date holidays into floating Mondays, a policy commonly called the Happy Monday System. The stated aim was to manufacture three-day weekends and stimulate domestic tourism. The four are Coming of Age Day on the second Monday of January, Marine Day on the third Monday of July, Respect for the Aged Day on the third Monday of September and Sports Day on the second Monday of October.

In 2026 those fall on 12 January, 20 July, 21 September and 12 October respectively, so each produces a long weekend automatically. The policy was not universally welcomed. Coming of Age Day used to sit on 15 January, and municipalities that organise coming-of-age ceremonies had their schedules scattered. Sports Day originally commemorated 10 October, the opening day of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and floating it broke that link entirely. That lingering discomfort with detaching a commemoration from its date is why the remaining holidays were left alone.

The unnamed days off: 6 May and 22 September explained

Two compensation mechanisms generate holidays that have no name of their own, and both appear in 2026.

The first is furikae kyujitsu, the substitute holiday. When a holiday falls on a Sunday, the nearest following day that is not already a holiday becomes one. The wording matters: it is the nearest following non-holiday, not simply the next day. Constitution Memorial Day 2026 falls on Sunday 3 May, but 4 May is Greenery Day and 5 May is Children’s Day, both already holidays, so the substitute is pushed all the way to Wednesday 6 May. Some calendars label that day as the substitute for Children’s Day; strictly it descends from Constitution Memorial Day, squeezed outward by the two holidays behind it.

The second is kokumin no kyujitsu, sometimes translated as citizens holiday. A working day sandwiched between two holidays becomes a holiday itself. Respect for the Aged Day is Monday 21 September 2026 and Autumnal Equinox Day is Wednesday 23 September, so Tuesday 22 September is absorbed and the autumn gains a three-day run that the media occasionally calls Silver Week. No separate announcement is required; the rule fires whenever the date structure allows it.

One asymmetry catches almost every newcomer. A holiday falling on a Saturday receives no compensation at all. Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, Japan does not shift it backwards or forwards, and the day is simply lost. 2026 happens to be a fortunate year in which no national holiday lands on a Saturday.

Golden Week is a cluster, not a holiday

Golden Week appears in no legislation. It is the name given to the pile-up of holidays at the turn of April and May. The 2026 arrangement runs like this: Showa Day on Wednesday 29 April, then two ordinary working days on Thursday 30 April and Friday 1 May, then Saturday 2 May, Constitution Memorial Day on Sunday 3 May, Greenery Day on Monday 4 May, Children’s Day on Tuesday 5 May and the substitute holiday on Wednesday 6 May.

The practical reading is that the second block is five consecutive days, and that two days of annual leave on 30 April and 1 May stretch the whole thing to eight, from 29 April through 6 May. Expect those two leave slots to be claimed early in any Japanese office, and expect the same calculation to have been made by everyone booking flights and hotels.

The histories of these days are tangled in a way that explains the sequence. 29 April was the birthday of the Showa Emperor. After his death in 1989 the date was retained as Greenery Day so the holiday would not vanish. In 2007 it was renamed Showa Day and Greenery Day was relocated to 4 May, which until then had only been a holiday by virtue of sitting between two others. Constitution Memorial Day marks the constitution coming into force on 3 May 1947, while Culture Day on 3 November marks its promulgation on 3 November 1946, so the two are bookends of the same document. Note also that International Workers Day on 1 May is not a public holiday in Japan, which reliably surprises European colleagues; some unions and companies grant it, but legally it is a working day.

The two biggest shutdowns are not holidays at all

This is the single most consequential misunderstanding about the Japanese calendar. The periods when Japan most thoroughly stops working are not on the statutory list.

The first is Obon, a Buddhist and ancestral observance held in most regions from 13 to 16 August. Families return to their hometowns, welcome ancestral spirits with a small fire and send them off again at the end, visit graves, and attend bon dances. Kyoto lights its mountainside bonfires during this window. None of it is legislated, yet a large share of companies, factories and small businesses simply close, the Shinkansen and airports hit their annual peak and expressway jams are measured in tens of kilometres. In 2026 Mountain Day is Tuesday 11 August and Wednesday 12 August is a working day, so a single day of leave links Saturday 8 August to Sunday 16 August as nine continuous days. Many firms announce a company-wide closure instead.

The second is nenmatsu-nenshi, the year-end and new-year period. A separate law governing the closure of administrative organs fixes 29 December to 3 January as non-working days for government offices, and banking regulations close bank branches from 31 December to 3 January. Going into 2026 that meant public counters and banks shut continuously, and because 4 January 2026 is a Sunday, government offices did not resume normal service until Monday 5 January. Private companies generally hold their final working day around 28 or 29 December and restart in the first week of January.

If you import only the statutory holidays into a shared calendar, mid-August and the new year gap will be invisible. They are also the two hardest periods of the year to book transport and accommodation, and the worst windows for shipping deadlines.

Working around the holidays as a foreign company

A public holiday in Japan does not oblige a private employer to close. Retail, food service, healthcare and transport all run, often with extra staff, and each company sets its own annual days off in its work rules. So the question to ask a Japanese counterpart is not whether tomorrow is a holiday, but whether their office is open.

Annual paid leave sits entirely separately from public holidays. Since the 2019 work-style reform, employers have an obligation to ensure that eligible employees actually take five days of paid leave each year, which is why you will see Japanese colleagues clearing leave in concentrated bursts, frequently around the year end. Combined with Golden Week and Obon, this produces three predictable capacity dips.

For scheduling, treat late April to early May, mid-August and the last week of December through the first week of January as blackout periods for decisions requiring multiple approvals. Japanese internal approval frequently involves circulating a proposal through several layers, and a single absent approver stalls the chain. Getting sign-off committed before a cluster begins is far cheaper than chasing it afterwards.

Travel logistics on holiday weekends

Reserved Shinkansen seats generally go on sale at 10:00 one month before the travel date, and popular departures in Golden Week or Obon can disappear within minutes of opening. Unreserved cars exist as a fallback but on peak days that means standing in the aisle for hours. Booking services tied to the operators allow earlier pre-registration, which is worth setting up before you need it rather than during the scramble.

Driving has its own trap. Expressway tolls in Japan normally carry a discount on weekends and holidays for cars using electronic toll collection, but the operators routinely suspend that discount during the busiest Golden Week, Obon and new-year periods precisely because they are trying not to add traffic. So the most expensive days to drive coincide with the most congested ones. Traffic forecasts published by the expressway companies ahead of each cluster are unusually accurate and worth consulting.

Domestic airfares follow the same curve, and hotel rates in Kyoto, Kanazawa and Okinawa can multiply during Golden Week. The counter-intuitive advice is that ordinary Monday holidays outside the clusters, Marine Day or Sports Day for instance, are far more manageable, because the three-day span is too short for most families to travel far.

What is open on a holiday, and one rule for museum visitors

Shops and restaurants are essentially unaffected. Convenience stores, supermarkets, department stores and drugstores all trade normally and often extend hours because footfall rises. Trains run to the holiday timetable, which usually means slightly reduced frequency but comparable late-night service. What closes are ward and city offices and bank counters; ATMs work, with holiday fee schedules and different operating windows. Hospitals hold emergency departments and designated holiday clinics only, so prescriptions should be filled beforehand.

One rule saves visitors a wasted morning. Japanese museums and art galleries typically close on Mondays, but when that Monday is a public holiday they open and shift the closure to the following Tuesday. 2026 contains six Monday holidays, so anyone in the habit of scheduling galleries on Tuesdays will find doors locked repeatedly. Checking the institution’s own site for the week in question is the only reliable method, because the shifted closure is rarely reflected in aggregator listings.

Things newcomers consistently get wrong

That a public holiday means everyone is off. It does not; it means public offices and banks are shut and private employers decide for themselves.

That Obon and the new-year break are statutory. They are not, and they are nevertheless the deepest shutdowns of the year, which is the most expensive misconception on this list for anyone planning shipments or project milestones.

That a Saturday holiday gets compensated. It does not, and the day is lost outright.

That the equinox dates can be looked up years ahead with confidence. They are astronomically determined and formally confirmed only in February of the preceding year, so far-future calendar entries are occasionally wrong by a day.

That 1 May is a day off because it is May Day elsewhere in the world. In Japan it is an ordinary working day sitting in the middle of Golden Week, which is why annual leave requests for that date are so heavily contested.

Cross-border planning notes

Unlike Mainland China’s tiaoxiu long breaks, Japan relies on the Act on National Holidays and substitute holidays. Golden Week is usually busier and pricier than China’s shorter Qingming breaks. Korean Seollal/Chuseok do not line up with Japanese dates.

Where these dates come from

Japan dates follow the Act on National Holidays. Obon and most year-end company shutdowns are not national holidays and are not coloured as such here.

Primary references for verification

• Japan Cabinet Office: National holidays (2026–2027)

Japan FAQ

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