October in Japan

Imported through Disney and English-conversation schools in the late 1990s, Halloween in Japan landed as a retail moment first: Don Quijote and 100-yen shops stack costume displays from late September, Starbucks runs a pumpkin-spice variant, USJ and Disney pivot the parks. None of it is trick-or-treating; almost no one comes to your door. The widely-circulated foreign-media image — the Shibuya scramble overrun by hundreds of thousands of costumed partiers every year — is a distortion most Japanese, including Tokyo locals, treat as a public-nuisance event. Shibuya Ward has banned street drinking in October, the mayor has held press conferences asking people not to come, and the news leads with the next-morning arrest count.

The mirror of the cherry-blossom front, moving in reverse — autumn color starts in Hokkaidō and Tōhoku in late September, reaches Tokyo and Kyoto in mid to late November, ends in Kyushu in early December. The weather services publish the same kind of forecast map. The early-October version is mostly Daisetsuzan in Hokkaidō, Oirase in Aomori, Nikkō in Tochigi.