What Japanese Kids Actually Do in the Summer Holidays

A Japanese child gets about forty days of summer holiday. That sounds generous until you learn what's in them. There is homework from every single subject. There is a stamp card for turning up to exercise in the park at seven in the morning. There is a second stamp card for the school swimming pool. And somewhere in the middle, the whole family gets in the car and drives to a grandparent's town to visit a grave. Forty days, and remarkably few of them are unstructured.

Radio Taiso: Exercising in the Park Before Breakfast

Start with the one that surprises visitors most. Across Japan, in local parks, children gather early every morning of the summer holiday to do radio taiso — a short, standardised set of calisthenics broadcast on the radio and performed in unison. It is exactly as communal as it sounds.

And it comes with the crucial motivational device: a stamp card. Turn up, get a stamp. The card is why children go, and the missing stamps are why some children don't. We'll be honest — plenty of kids, including some of us, didn't manage to make it every morning.

The same system runs at the school swimming pool, which opens over the holidays for supervised sessions. That has its own stamp card too. Much of a Japanese summer holiday is quietly organised around collecting stamps.

The Homework Is Real

This is the part that tends to shock families elsewhere. Japanese children get summer homework from every subject — not a reading list, not an optional project, but assigned work across the board that is collected and marked when term resumes.

There is also a famous, universal outcome: a great many children leave most of it until the final days. The last week of the Japanese summer holiday is a nationally recognised scramble, and every Japanese adult has a memory of it. The forty days are long, but they end with a deadline.

One of the assignments is jiyu-kenkyu, a free-choice research project. In practice children often build something — a toy, a model, a contraption. Not, we should say, a candy kit; despite what you might assume from a shop that sells educational sweets, that isn't what these projects are for.

Obon: The Trip to the Grave

In the middle of August comes Obon, and with it the single biggest domestic travel period of the Japanese year. Understanding why requires dropping the tourist framing: Obon is not primarily a festival. It is when you visit your ancestors' grave.

Family graves are in the family's home region, which is often not where people now live. So Japanese people return — the word used is the same one for going home — and the roads and trains fill accordingly.

The day itself has a shape that repeats across the country. You go to the grave in the morning. Then you go and have a slightly nicer lunch than usual — sushi, or yakiniku. That's the pattern: an obligation, observed properly, followed by a good meal with the relatives you only see once or twice a year. For a child it means a long car journey, an unfamiliar house, and being fed well.

How This Compares

Frequently Asked Questions

The other half of a Japanese childhood is what children do the rest of the year — see our guide to ten traditional Japanese games and which ones kids still play.