November 2025
Cherry blossom gets the attention. It has the word — hanami, flower-viewing — and the photographs, and the crowds, and the two-week window that turns Japan into a subject of global pilgrimage each spring. All of this is deserved.
But koyo — the autumn leaf-turning — is Japan at its most extraordinary, and it is attended with less fanfare and a great deal more depth.
The colours are not the soft pinks of spring. They are violent: crimson, amber, gold, the particular orange of a Japanese maple at its peak, which is a colour you cannot prepare yourself for. The light in October and November is lower and harder, and it makes the leaves glow from within.
The season moves south across the country over several weeks. In Nikko, in the mountains north of Tokyo, the peak falls in late October. In Kyoto, where it matters most — where the temple gardens have been designed over centuries to make maximum use of it — it arrives in mid-November. In Hiroshima, a week later.
We build koyo itineraries that follow the colour front south, which allows you to experience the peak multiple times in different landscapes. You sleep in a ryokan in Nikko when the mountains are at their most flamboyant, then arrive in Kyoto when the city has turned golden and the tourists of autumn are fewer than those of cherry blossom season.
This is one of Japan's best-kept secrets. We'd like to show it to you.