Tokyo

Tokyo in Snow

Tokyo gets a real snowfall once or twice a winter, and the city is spectacularly unprepared for it. What it looks like, when it happens, and what to do when the trains stop.

Tokyo Station lit red brick behind heavy falling snow at night — Marunouchi, Tokyo · January 2022

Snow reaches central Tokyo on one or two days in a normal winter, usually in January or February, and almost never settles for long. When it does settle, the city turns into something you cannot plan a trip around and will never forget if you happen to be there.

These photographs were all taken on a single evening, between five and nine, as a forecast of "a little snow in places" turned into several centimetres across the city centre.

At a glance

How often: One or two settling falls a winter, nearly always January or February
Warning: Tokyo closes at 1cm. Trains thin out, buses stop, flights cancel
Best hours: The first three hours after dark, before it is walked flat
Where: Marunouchi, the palace moat, and any avenue with old trees
Shoes: Smooth-soled city shoes are useless. The pavements turn to polish

The city is not built for it

Office towers in Marunouchi behind thick falling snow, lights blurred by the flakes — Six in the evening. The forecast that morning had said rain.Marunouchi, Tokyo · January 2022

Tokyo has no snow tyres, no grit lorries to speak of, and pavements of polished tile. A fall that a northern city would ignore closes schools, stops the buses and cuts the train service to a trickle by late evening.

That is worth knowing before you romanticise it. If snow is forecast and you have a flight or a Shinkansen the next morning, move it earlier rather than later.

A snow-covered plaza in front of a lit brick station building with figures walking across it — The plaza in front of the station, about an hour into the fall.Marunouchi, Tokyo · January 2022

Where it photographs best

Three kinds of place, in order of how well they hold up:

Marunouchi and the station plaza. Warm brick, cold light, and enough space to stand back. The one place in Tokyo where snow and architecture are in the same frame.
The palace moat and its avenues. Old trees take snow properly, and the street lamps turn it orange.
Any wide road at night. Traffic thins, the surface goes white, and the city loses its usual hard edges.

A tree-lined avenue under snow at night, street lamps glowing through the fall — Lamp light does most of the work. No flash — raise the ISO and accept the grain.Tokyo · January 2022

Snow settling on a wide avenue with skyscrapers behind — By nine the pavements were ice rather than snow.Tokyo · January 2022

What to do when the trains stop

Services do not stop all at once; they thin, then bunch, then stop. The pattern is predictable:

Check the operator's own status page, not a general news site. The JR East and Tokyo Metro apps update faster than anything else.
Move to a major interchange early. Trains keep running longer on the big lines.
Give up gracefully. Hotels near the main stations release rooms on nights like this, and a capsule hotel beats four hours on a platform.
Walk, if it is under an hour. Tokyo is safe and well-lit, and the walk is the best part of the night.

When to try for it

You cannot book snow. What you can do is be in Tokyo in the second half of January or the first half of February, watch the forecast two days out, and keep the evening free when a low passes along the south coast — the pattern that brings wet snow to the city rather than to the mountains.

Snow falling past a street lamp with office buildings dissolving into the white behind it — The fall peaked around eight and stopped before midnight.Tokyo · January 2022

If it does not come, the mountains two hours away have it reliably all winter, and the trains that go there run whatever the weather.