May 2027

May is when Japanese people themselves travel, which tells you everything. The weather turns flawless — warm days, cool nights, mountains sharp against blue. The new green of the forests, *shinryoku*, is treated as seriously as autumn foliage, and should be. In Tokyo's oldest neighborhood, the year's rowdiest festival sends a hundred portable shrines colliding through streets around Senso-ji temple. In Kyoto, horses race along a shrine path as they have, without interruption, for nine hundred years. Rice planting begins, and in certain villages it is done ceremonially — women in indigo, songs older than writing, mud to the knee. Avoid the first week, when the entire nation moves at once for Golden Week and inns triple their prices. Come mid-month instead. May in Japan asks nothing of you: no umbrella, no coat, no strategy. It is the country at its most effortless, and its most confident.