Japan Photo Guide

My favorite season is coming back! Even though I love cherry blossom season, in my opinion autumn is the best time to visit and travel around Japan. Below is a chart for the average dates to best observe fall leaves in Japan.

Along with cherry blossom season, fall is a great time to visit Japan. In any country, fall leaves are beautiful and make for great photos and this holds especially true with Japan. Japan’s most famous fall leaf is the Japanese Maple Tree which turns brilliant red in the fall. These red leaves are referred to as “kouyou” (紅葉) in Japanese.

Read more about fall in Japan and check out some of my favorite places to see the autumn foliage after the jump.

The photo on the left was taken at The Itchiku Kubota Kimono Museum and the one on the right on the grounds of the Golden Pavilion.

There are many sites in Japanese that give more detailed information, I cannot read Japanese very well, but even so, there are some sites that are very helpful. For example rurubu.com has a map of Japan and a small color picture of a maple leaf to represent the current status of the leaves in the area. Another site worth checking out is Yahoo Japan’s site that looks like it encourages user submissions. If you want to find a different site, simply go do a google search for “紅葉” followed by the year (紅葉 2008) and you will get more sites in Japanese. The photo below was taken at Kinkakuji in Kyoto.

The bulleted list below are places I have been to and personally recommend for the fall season.

• Arashiyama(Kansai)
• Fuji Five Lakes
• Towadako (Lake Towada, Tohoku)
• Oirase Strean (Tohoku)
• Kyoto
• Nanzenji (Kyoto)
• Naruko (Tohoku)
• Nikko (Kansai)
• Tokyo