Japan Off-Peak

When is Japan least crowded? A month-by-month calendar for all 47 prefectures

Blue cells are the months with the fewest guests in each prefecture's hotels and inns, orange cells the busiest. ● marks the quietest month (months within 3% of each other are tied). Counts are per day, from Japan's official 2025 hotel statistics. Shading compares months within each prefecture, not prefectures with each other.

Showing foreign visitors: fewest most · ● quietest ·   high sampling error (foreign figure only)
JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Hokkaido & Tohoku
Hokkaido●
Aomori●
Iwate●
Miyagi●●
Akita●
Yamagata●
Fukushima●●
Kanto
Ibaraki●
Tochigi●
Gunma●
Saitama●
Chiba●
Tokyo●●●●●
Kanagawa●
Chubu
Niigata●
Toyama●
Ishikawa●
Fukui●
Yamanashi●
Nagano●
Gifu●
Shizuoka●
Aichi●
Kansai
Mie●
Shiga●●
Kyoto●●
Osaka●
Hyogo●●
Nara●
Wakayama●
Chugoku & Shikoku
Tottori●
Shimane●●
Okayama●
Hiroshima●●
Yamaguchi●
Tokushima●●●
Kagawa●
Ehime●
Kochi●
Kyushu & Okinawa
Fukuoka●
Saga●
Nagasaki●
Kumamoto●
Oita●●●
Miyazaki●
Kagoshima●
Okinawa●

Tap a prefecture for its numbers. "Foreign visitors" are guests with no address in Japan. Hotel nights are not the same as crowds at sights: day-trippers aren't counted.

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What the calendar shows

Two different "quiet" months

The month with the fewest hotel guests overall was January in 32 prefectures. The month with the fewest foreign guests was most often August (13 prefectures).

Ski country runs backwards

In Nagano, January had 4.4 times as many foreign guests per day as August. Niigata, Yamagata and Hokkaido show the same winter peak.

Tokyo barely changes

Tokyo's foreign guest nights per day moved only 1.2× between its quietest and busiest month in 2025.