If you're relentlessly curious, this can be your ultimate guide to Japan. Start by listening to the podcast. Or save the podcast for later. It's your choice.

Japan. Travel. Adventure. We were planning a trip to Japan, and I was searching for something that would be like an ultimate guide. I couldn’t find one so I decided to create it myself. Here’s my biased and ultimate guide to Japan.

In addition to this Applied Curiosity Lab Radio podcast episode, this can be your cheat sheet for planning and executing your own trip. This post also serves as show notes for the podcast. In both this post and podcast you will find insights, advice, personal preferences, and hidden adventure opportunities. This is as comprehensive as my personally biased guide to Japan can be. I blame sake for any important things that you find that I overlooked.

When should you go? That’s a personal question so here’s a personal answer.

We went in early October. Go then. Or not. In early October the fall foliage is not at its peak, but since we knew that we would come home to gorgeous foliage in Portland, we didn’t care. We had planned to visit Mt Fuji and then hang with the Snow Monkeys outside Nagano, but ultimately we couldn’t pull ourselves away from Tokyo so we skipped those adventures. We did hear that it was not yet snowy or particularly cold in Nagano.

When we started in Nara it was warm and misty. In Kyoto (an hour from Nara by train) it was unseasonably warm. We sweated in short sleeves. In the higher elevations like Koyasan, it was cool, but pleasant. By the time we got to Tokyo two weeks later, it was rainy and comfortably cool. We missed a huge typhoon by one day. The rain was typhoon foreplay.

When you go also depends a lot on where you plan to go. The cold island of Hokkaido will vary greatly from the subtropical islands of the Okinawan archipelago. This is my biased account, so I’m focusing on the weather where we were on Honshu, the most populated and largest island of Japan.

I’m not adamant about you going in October, so if you skip this first piece of advice, here’s what you may want to know about the other months.

November in Japan is crisp and cool with glorious autumn foliage, but we found better airfare in October. You probably will too. In December, it gets cold across most of Japan, and I’m less likely to maximize adventures by poking around in alleys and up hidden stairs when I’m cold. January starts ski season, and February is peak ski season. Skiing would be fun, but since my travel partner husband doesn’t ski, it might not have been the best time for the two of us to go together. Plus, this was a curiosity quest, not a sports-y adventure. It’s still pretty cold in March. That’s okay, but I don’t like to spend all my time inside museums preventing numb fingers. April and May is peak season with the cherry blossoms flashing tourists their flowering glory. I’m sure that the blossoms are prettier than the cherry blossoms on my own street at home, but I don’t want my trees to sense that I’m judging them. June is full-on rainy season (tsuyu, the plum rain). I don’t need to travel to hang out in rain because I live in rainy season nine months out of the year. July is the end of the rainy season and it starts to get very hot and humid throughout most of Japan. July is also when we plan our domestic road trip adventures. Next year we’ll probably fly up to Alaska to join Airship in July. I mention this so you can check out my friends’ amazing Slowboat website, and maybe apply to join one of their flotillas.