When to Visit Japan
And making the most of seasonal challenges
If there’s one thing I miss from my childhood, it’s summer vacation. I have to assume that it was not the best time for my parents, my mother needing to constantly corral my younger and brother and me while worrying over my dying father, but the upshot was spending time with cousins. A month in Virginia with my father’s sister Mary and her family. Reunions in New England. Time with my mother’s sister Regina in Saratoga. But my favorite summer memories date to the years we lived in an apartment on the Hudson in Nyack, 1974 to 1977.
Although all that remains of the docks where people went crabbing are some submerged pylons in this satellite photo, the apartment building’s pool is still there (and perhaps bigger than I remember—the wooden tennis courts that were on the river side of the pool are long gone, it appears).
I was never as happy as I was in that pool, playing Marco Polo for hours on end. Then there were the days spent riding bikes with my cool friend, Emily. She and I were the oldest kids in the building, and we lorded it over my brother and his friends, happy to ignore them as we clothespinned baseball cards to the spokes of our Schwinn wheels so that when we pedaled down toward the Tappan Zee or up toward Hook Mountain, people definitely heard us coming. Trrrrrrrrat!
All of which might be the roundaboutiest way of saying that the summer of 2026 is nothing like my childhood. Although I have the Lambda Literary writing retreat coming up in early August, June (and by extension, July) has been very busy. A project at work is set to go live in mid-July, and it’s been long days and lots of worries leading up to that.
But enough about me. (And yes, my brain is replaying the second line in that bitchy rejoinder: “What do you think about me?)
I’ve been fielding questions from friends interested in travel, most of whom ask the following:
When is a good time to go to Japan?
Although both 1988 and 1993 were my favorite years in Japan, I assume that most of us don’t have access to time machines. And that’s a good thing. In the lead-up to the Tōkyō Olympics, much work went into making Japan an easier place to navigate as a tourist. Signs in English are much more, and you’ll see the same signage in Korean and Chinese as well in many urban locations. The yen is much weaker now than it was when I lived in Japan, so travel from the US is in many ways a bargain. (Knowing that, however, many hotel chains and even railway companies have raised their prices on rooms and rail passes. Boo.)
