Autumn Leaves Dates by City: Usual Maple Dates, 2025 Results and How Much They Shift

Somewhere in the planning of every autumn trip to Japan, someone opens a calendar and asks which week the maples will be red in Kyoto, and whether Tokyo will have caught up by then. Japan has a national habit of following the color the way it follows cherry blossoms, with a name for the outing itself, momijigari, leaf hunting. The short answer is that the color moves down the country in a slow wave, reaching Hokkaido first and the big southern cities in December, and each city has a usual date that gives you a place to start.

The dates below are the day each city’s maples are judged to have turned, which is a good anchor for choosing where to be and when.

Red maple leaves around a temple · Illustration

When do the leaves peak in each Japanese city?

There is no single peak week for Japan, because the maples turn city by city from the northern islands down to Kyushu, and the Japan Meteorological Agency tracks that wave with one measurement: the maple color-change day, called kaede koyo. It is the first day on which, looking at the whole sample tree, most of its leaves have turned red. That is a precise moment, and the pleasure of a temple garden or a river gorge is a little broader than that moment, with orange and yellow leaves, red ones still fresh and the ground starting to fill with fallen color.

The agency also describes the wave in broad strokes. The change begins in mid-October in eastern Hokkaido, reaches the Tohoku region and eastern Hokuriku around November 20, and arrives in Kanto, Hokuriku, Tokai, Chugoku, Shikoku and northern Kyushu around November 30.

The Pacific coasts of Kanto and Tokai, the Kinki region and southern Kyushu come last, from early to mid December. For a traveler building a route, that means the same trip can start in red and end in green, or the other way round, depending on which direction you travel.

Hokkaido and northern Honshu

Sapporo has the earliest usual date of any city in the list, followed by Hakodate, with Aomori not far behind. If your trip is in the second half of October or the first days of November, these are the cities where the maples are most likely to be turning or already turned. Sendai belongs to the Tohoku group, and its usual date falls later in November, in step with the agency’s description of the region.

Think of Hokkaido as a place to see the first act of the season. By the time the maples of Kyoto begin to redden, the leaves in Sapporo are long past, so the two cities can never be paired in the same week for color. Plan one or the other, or move from north to south across several weeks.

The middle of the country

Nagano, Nara, Hiroshima, Kanazawa, Tokyo and Nagoya sit in the large middle band, with usual dates running from the middle of November to the very end of the month. Nagano comes first of these, ahead of Nara and Hiroshima, then Kanazawa, and Tokyo and Nagoya share the same usual day at the end of the month.

Kanazawa is worth a mention for travelers who like gardens, since Kenrokuen is the kind of landscape garden where the maples are a main attraction. Tokyo’s parks and shrine grounds, and Nara’s temple precincts, follow the same calendar as their city’s sample tree. A single garden can still turn a little earlier or later than its city, so treat the city date as the center of a window and not as an appointment.

Kyoto, Osaka and the southern cities

This surprises first-time visitors, who often assume Kyoto is red in early November. The usual date for Kyoto’s city tree is in the first week of December, which is why the temple districts of Higashiyama and Arashiyama are so closely tied to the last stretch of autumn on the calendar.

Yokohama’s late date is also a reminder that the Pacific coast of the Kanto region runs later than Tokyo’s list entry suggests, in line with the agency’s description of the coasts arriving in early to mid December. If your trip is built around a southern route, the first half of December can be a better match for the leaves than the middle of November.

What are the average dates?

The usual maple color-change date runs from late October in Sapporo to mid-December in Kagoshima, and the table gives each city’s date in order, with the day it was actually observed in 2025 beside it.

City	Usual date	Observed in 2025
Sapporo	October 28	November 6
Hakodate	November 2	November 6
Nagano	November 12	November 19
Aomori	November 13	November 10
Nara	November 21	November 14
Sendai	November 21	November 20
Hiroshima	November 22	November 27
Kanazawa	November 24	November 25
Tokyo	November 28	November 23
Nagoya	November 28	November 25
Osaka	December 1	December 4
Kobe	December 1	November 26
Fukuoka	December 1	December 1
Kyoto	December 5	December 10
Yokohama	December 14	December 15
Kagoshima	December 15	December 2

How to read the list

Each date is the day the city’s sample maple was judged to have turned, so it describes the city proper, with its parks, shrines and street trees. It does not tell you the date for a mountain valley, a lakeside or a garden you may have in mind. The useful way to use it is as an order: the cities at the top of the table turn first, the cities at the bottom last, and the ones in the middle of the list can sit close together.

Notice how tightly some cities cluster. Tokyo and Nagoya share a day, and Osaka, Kobe and Fukuoka share another. Nara and Sendai also share a day, even though they are in different parts of the country. If you are choosing between two cities in a cluster, the leaves are not a reason to pick one over the other, and you can decide on food, temples, museums or the route instead.

Building a trip around the dates

A trip to the classic cities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka sits well in the later part of the table, so the end of November into early December is the stretch where the usual dates of the three come into view together. Tokyo comes first, and Osaka and then Kyoto follow. A traveler who wants red in all three can start in Tokyo and finish in Kyoto, letting the calendar move with the itinerary.

Someone arriving in late October is better placed in the north, where Sapporo and Hakodate are the first to turn. A mid-November trip fits Nagano, Aomori, Nara or Sendai. If your dates are fixed and you cannot move them, pick the cities whose usual date is closest to your week, and treat the ones before as past color and the ones after as still green.

How much do they vary?

From one autumn to the next a city’s date can move by about a week in either direction, and in 2025 the largest gaps between the usual date and the observed date were close to two weeks. The pattern was not one of a whole country running early or late, since some cities came ahead of their usual date and others came behind it in the same autumn.

Cities that came early in 2025

Kagoshima showed the largest move, turning nearly two weeks before its usual mid-December date. Nara came about a week early, and Tokyo and Kobe each came about five days early. For a traveler in Tokyo that meant the maples were in color by the weekend before the usual date at the end of the month.

Early cities can catch a visitor who planned around the usual date and arrived after the color had passed its first day.

Cities that came late in 2025

Sapporo ran over a week behind its usual date, and Nagano about a week behind. Kyoto and Hiroshima each came about five days late, Hakodate came a few days after its usual date, and Osaka was three days behind.

Kanazawa and Yokohama were a single day late. Kyoto’s later result, in a city whose usual date is already in the first week of December, pushed the color well into the second week of the month.

A later date matters most for travelers who have only a narrow window, because the leaves may not yet have turned when they arrive. If you are planning around Kyoto and your trip ends in late November, the leaves may still be turning on the last days, and a few extra days of margin at the end of the trip are worth having.

Cities that stayed on schedule

Fukuoka matched its usual date exactly in 2025, and Kanazawa, Sendai and Yokohama were within a day. Not every city moves much, and these four are a reminder that the usual date is a fair guide for many places even if it is a poor guide for a few. The wider the gap in one city, the less you can lean on it, and the closer the match, the more it is a date you can plan around.

One autumn is a single example, not a rule about which cities run early or late, so it is best not to read 2025 as a trend. The 2025 column in the table is a picture of how far a single season can pull a date from the usual one, and that is all it is meant to show.

Good to know before you go

Leaf-viewing grounds are sometimes in the same city as the sample tree and sometimes not, and it is worth keeping a day or two of slack in a route that depends on color. Autumn is also a season where daylight is shorter than in summer, which affects how much you fit into a single day of garden visits and temple walks.

Sources

Japan Meteorological Agency, maple color-change dates 2025-2026 with difference from the 1991-2020 normal (https://www.data.jma.go.jp/sakura/data/phn_014.html), checked October 11, 2026
Japan Meteorological Agency, kaede2020.pdf (https://www.data.jma.go.jp/sakura/data/kaede2020.pdf), checked October 11, 2026