About 季語
The name
In haiku, a kigo — 季語, the season word — is the one word that fixes a poem in its time of year. Fireflies mean June. Momiji means November. A poem without its kigo is unmoored.
Japan's seasonal phenomena are those words made physical: cherry blossom, hydrangea, autumn leaves, first snow. The Kigo is a map of them — where each one happens, and when.
What this is
Japan is never quite the same country twice. Week by week, one season gives way to another.
The Kigo follows these changes across Japan's 47 prefectures to answer a simple question: what is worth travelling for now, and why? Every entry is a dated reason to be somewhere: a blossom or foliage window, a festival, an exhibition, a show, a market, a food season.
It is written for people who have been to Japan before and are planning a few weeks ahead. Beyond the familiar names lie regions that too easily stay outside a traveller's route; this project exists to draw the eye towards them, and to offer not only somewhere to go, but a reason to care about the place once you arrive.
How we choose
Every seasonal window is treated as a span of time: a beginning, a peak, an end. Dates, hours and prices come only from official pages, and each entry keeps its source and the date of our last check.
Places are chosen not for spectacle alone, but for their seasonal character, cultural meaning, and what they reveal about a region. The recommended events and places are chosen by hand. Where an official recognition exists, a UNESCO listing or a national designation, it is shown with a link to the record. Three tags help you read the list: Free for what needs no ticket, Local for what is worth the trip but little visited from abroad, or far from the main routes, and Popular online for places that travellers share widely on the internet.
How to read the dates
Blossom and foliage windows are averages, and a given year runs up to ten days either way: as the date nears, the forecasts we link to matter more than the calendar. Each window is marked Upcoming, Starting, Peak or Ending from today's date.
Festival and exhibition dates are the organiser's, for the year shown. Where the next edition is not announced yet, the entry says so rather than guessing. Cards show the crowd level where we know it and the day tickets go on sale; the day counters use the date on your own device.
Where the numbers come from
Averages are for 1991–2020 unless a card says otherwise.
- Japan Meteorological Agency · first bloom and full bloom of cherry, the day the maples turn, climate normals for eight cities, snow cover, the rainy season and typhoons
- National Astronomical Observatory of Japan · the calendar of holidays, the harvest moon, sunrise and sunset
- Agency for Cultural Affairs · the national database of designated cultural properties
- JNTO · monthly visitor arrivals
- Organisers, temples, shrines, parks and museums · dates, hours and prices, linked from every card
Photographs, maps and drawings
Photographs belong to their authors and are used under Creative Commons licences or under the terms of local tourism associations; the credit is on every card. The map of Japan is by Geolonia, under the GFDL. The seasonal drawings, the branch, the moon and the grasses, were made for the site with image-generation tools. The typefaces are Inter and Shippori Mincho, under the SIL Open Font License. Text and design © The Kigo.
Your trip and your data
My trip lives in your browser only: there is no account, and nothing is sent to us. Sharing a trip puts it into the link itself. The site sets no cookies. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and collects no personal data, and the fonts are served from this site. Like any website, the host keeps ordinary server logs. Links to Google Maps, Booking.com, Agoda and ticket sellers are plain links, without referral codes. More on privacy.
Who
Made by someone who values Japan for what makes its culture distinct.
