Top 5 Reasons Why Golden Week Sucks

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I usually don’t stray much from urban exploration, but this week inspired me to a little rant about one of Japan’s holy cows: Golden Week. Still related to urban exploration as it massively affected my explorations this year…
What is Golden Week? Golden Week is a rather massive accumulation of public holidays in Japan in late April and early May.
April 29th: Showa Day / 昭和の日 / shōwa no hi (being dedicated to Emperor Showa / Hirohito who reigned from 1926 to 1989 – his controversial role in WW2 is still disputed…)
May 3rd: Constitution Memorial Day / 憲法記念日 / kenpō kinenbi
May 4th: Greenery Day / みどりの日 / midori no hi
May 5th: Children’s Day / こどもの日 / kodomo no hi (widely known as Boys’ Day / 端午の節句 / tango no sekku – have you ever seen photos of those colourful carp banners? They are related to this day…)
With that many national holidays close to each other you have to take two or three days off and can be absent from for a whole week (or as a Japanese friend counts it: taking off 9 days) – and Japanese people, usually known for being reluctant to take off days from work even if they are sick, do exactly that in large numbers. In fact so many people take off days from work during Golden Week that you actually kinda have to justify yourself if you don’t do it. Or as a Japanese proverb says: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. You really don’t wanna stick out…
This sudden increase of spare time for a lot of people, glorified by the term Golden Week, of course comes with a couple of detriments that are widely ignored since… well, it’s friggin Golden Week and everybody has to love it! Like New Year’s Eve parties and Christmas with the whole family…
So I will say publicly what most Japanese wouldn’t even dare to say on the quiet: Golden Week sucks! Big time!
Most of the points on the list are interacting with (or are depending on) each other, so the order is kind of interchangeable.

5.) Forced paid vacation days
When you are an employee of a Japanese company in Japan you usually don’t get a lot of paid vacation days. Between 10 and maybe 15 per year the most – a ridiculous amount to the 25 to 36 (!) I’m used to in my home country of Germany. There are no sick days either. So even if you have to go to a doctor you have to take half a day off to see one on your own time and partially on your own dime (co-payment is 30% with the standard health insurance – of anything! Consultation, medication, …). While a lot of Japanese people jump on the idea of taking two days off to create a week of not going to work others are reluctant to do that – because they actually have work to do, because they don’t feel like going on vacation, especially when everybody is going (see #4, #3, and #2), because… whatever reason. So some companies use the opportunity to flush out those two or three vacation days by “recommending” their employees to take them off. And by Japanese communication standards “recommending” means “ordering”. Last year the company I work for used the opportunity of Golden Week to install new ACs after recommending everybody to take days off, making it virtually impossible to not follow the recommendation. Sure, I could have made a fuzz and insisted on moving to floors where no installation work was going on – but that would have been pretty much like pissing in the face of an LA cop after he stopped you for drunk driving…

4.) Prices increase massively
A lot of people use the free week to travel – visiting family and going on vacation. Since prices depend on supply and demand the costs for hotels, train and airplane tickets, rental cars and in some case even food rise significantly. JR charges a special “high season” surcharge for seat reservations and hotels tend to charge holiday prices even for the non-holiday days of Golden Week – but special prices are not a rarity in general; and those are not special discount offers…

3.) Everything is crowded
No matter where you go, everything is crowded. Hotels are fully booked often weeks in advance. The non-reservation cars of Shinkansen superexpress trains are so crowded that JR employees ask travellers not to get on even before the train arrives at a station – and that happened to me at 6 a.m.! You have insanely long waiting lines in front of restaurants and at amusement parks; that’s crazy busy even by the standards of a country where the first opening of a Coldstone Creamery ice cream shop created waiting lines of up to two hours for weeks!

2.) No spontaneity
In daily (work) life I often have the feeling that Japanese people can’t plan. Hell, some colleagues have the job title of “Planner” and they wouldn’t be able to plan their way out of a paper back. But that’s not entirely true. Japanese people can plan if you give them enough time to do so – hence the intervals of as little as 2.5 minutes on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, a train loop line in the city centre of Japan’s capital.
What most Japanese people have a hard time with is improvising – when things don’t go according to plan a lot of them are in deep trouble. So I guess Golden Week really caters to the Japanese way of living. You plan it weeks or even months ahead of time and it doesn’t really matter that there is absolutely no chance for spontaneity – everything is set in stone anyways.
I’m a person that is extremely well organized at work and I’m fairly adaptable to unforeseen situations; especially since it’s part of my job. In my spare time I like to mix up things a little bit. When I plan an urbex trip I have an idea of the locations I want to see, but I always have alternatives ready, just in case I need or want to change plans. Usually I don’t book hotels in advance and I don’t make seat reservations on trains as I feel it would lock me down too much. What if I want to stay at a location shorter or longer? Or switch orders for whatever reasons? I like to keep it flexible. Which really backfired this week and inspired me to write down what I was thinking for years: Golden Week sucks!
I went down to Northern Kyushu to explore a couple of locations I was longing to see for months or even years. When I arrived in my beloved Sasebo I was told that there were no rooms available. At all. Not a single one for one night. I was aware of the risk, but it always worked out so far, so I asked the lovely ladies at the local tourist information to phone around after I went to the usual suspects myself. After more than a dozen calls and to the growing frustration of my helpers they finally found a ryokan on Oshima with a room available – Oshima was on my way to revisit Ikeshima, so it was a perfect match. My Japanese isn’t great, so I only spoke English at the tourist information, but I understand a little bit of the local language. After the tourist office lady told me that she found a room I heard her telling the ryokan staff in Japanese that was American (which I’m not, but I guess every white person speaking decent English is automatically classified as American) and if that would be okay. And all of a sudden the room situation was difficult (muzukashii, むずかしい). If something is “difficult” in Japan it basically means that it is not going to happen – the reason doesn’t matter. It’s difficult and nobody wants to deal with difficult situation, so that’s it. While “yes” usually means “I understand” and not necessarily “yes, that is what we are going to do”, “difficult” is the polite version of “no”; or whatever is considered polite in Japan…
Not having a room for the night thanks to a racist ryokan with the last available room in all of the Sasebo area (yes, I’m playing the racist card here – politically correct or not! Unless you lived in Japan for a while you have no idea how xenophobic Japanese people can be. If you are polite in English and racist in Japanese about 6 billion people worldwide won’t understand what you are saying…) I decided to cut my exploration plans from 4 days to 3 days by skipping Ikeshima. So I went back to Hakata Station in Fukuoka, the most populous city in Kyushu. The tourist information centre there was way less helpful and didn’t even try. No rooms in Fukuoka, probably nowhere in Northern Kyushu. That’s what they told me and ended the conversation. So I decided to go back home – after getting up at 4.40 in the morning, standing in crowded JR trains for more than 4 hours (on the way down to Kyushu alone!) and spending around 35.000 Yen on train tickets I learned the hard way how much Golden Week sucks, especially if you dare to try it the oh so hated spontaneous way… and that there are no available hotel rooms in Northern Kyushu, at least not if you are a foreigner in Japan; which really, really disappointed me as I love Japan. Otherwise I wouldn’t go into my seventh year of living here soon…

1.) No escape
You can’t escape Golden Week. Even if you are smart enough to stay at home and not to go on spontaneous trips. Well, maybe if you live in some mountain village you won’t be affected, but I’m sure they have special Golden Week shows on TV, too. But everybody else is affected negatively by Golden Week in one way or the other. Especially smaller businesses close during Golden Week, which means that the neighbourhood bakery is most likely closed. So are mom and dad restaurants if you need a decent meal during lunch break; same goes for the local waterhole. Supermarkets most likely close earlier or even completely. If you wanna go anywhere on the weekends involving Golden Week those places will most likely be busier. You just can’t escape it…

Sure, Japan is a rich country and in the end all those things are only minor annoyances to be filed under “First World Problems”, not tragedies of epic proportions; but they are nevertheless annoyances that make the term Golden Week rather misleading. I remember a colleague once telling me in a different context that “you can’t polish shit”. Well, I guess in Japan(ese) you can – and the turd of this golden calf is called Golden Week!

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