Japan Public Holidays

Respect for the Aged Day and Marine Day, both movable and excluded from the fixed-date table above, were deliberately shifted to Mondays under a "Happy Monday System" reform enacted in the early 2000s specifically to create more long weekends — a genuine, government-led policy change to the structure of the holiday calendar itself.

Japan's public holiday calendar blends holidays tied to the Imperial family, Shinto and Buddhist tradition, and modern civic themes, and is one of the more holiday-dense calendars among major economies, with 16 national holidays as of the current list.

The Emperor's Birthday holiday moves when the reigning emperor changes, since it always marks the current emperor's actual birthday — it shifted from December 23 to February 23 when Emperor Naruhito acceded to the throne in 2019.

Golden Week, an unusually holiday-dense stretch in late April and early May combining Showa Day, Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day, and Children's Day within a single week, is one of Japan's most significant travel periods, alongside the separately observed Obon season in mid-August (which isn't a national statutory holiday itself but is widely treated as one culturally).

Japan has a specific "furikae kyujitsu" (substitute holiday) rule: if a national holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday becomes a substitute holiday, and a lesser-known "citizens' holiday" rule additionally makes a single weekday sandwiched between two holidays a holiday itself — both real, codified rules rather than informal custom.

Coming of Age Day, honoring young people who turned 20 (Japan's age of legal adulthood until a 2022 law lowered it to 18 for most purposes) during the past year, is held on the second Monday of January under the same Happy Monday System that shifted several other Japanese holidays.

Japan also has a distinctive "kokumin no kyujitsu" (citizens' holiday) provision that automatically turns any single ordinary weekday sandwiched between two public holidays into a holiday itself, which is how the country ends up with holiday-dense stretches like Golden Week beyond simply the four named holidays that anchor it.

Japan's Health and Sports Day (now Sports Day) was originally fixed to October 10 to commemorate the opening of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics before being moved to a floating second-Monday-of-October date under the Happy Monday reforms, and was briefly shifted again to coincide with the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics — a real example of a holiday's date responding to a specific major event.

Japan's Labor Standards Act notably doesn't require employers to give employees the national holidays off with pay by default — many of Japan's public holidays are observed at government offices, schools, and banks specifically, with private-sector observance depending more on individual company policy than in some other major economies covered on this page.

Japan's New Year holiday period (Shogatsu), spanning several days around January 1st through 3rd, is culturally treated as a much longer effective closure period for many businesses than the single statutory New Year's Day holiday itself would suggest, similar in spirit to how Golden Week functions as an extended travel period built around a cluster of individually named holidays.

Coming of Age Day, Marine Day, Respect for the Aged Day, Health and Sports Day, and the equinox holidays are weekday-rule or astronomically-set and computed separately.

Source: Japan Cabinet Office national holiday list, as of 2026-07-12.