How to Find Out What's On in Japan When You Don't Speak Japanese
By What's On Japan Team
Japan has a problem that no other major travel destination quite replicates. The country hosts an extraordinary volume of events — art shows, food festivals, underground music nights, gallery openings, pop-up restaurants, cultural ceremonies — the vast majority of which are announced only in Japanese, on Japanese websites, through Japanese social media accounts, to a Japanese audience.
For a foreign visitor or resident, the result is a strange experience: you can sense that things are happening all around you, but you cannot find them. The event listings that appear in English cover a fraction of what is actually going on. Here is a practical guide to closing that gap.
The Problem With Standard English Resources
The main English-language event sites do an excellent job covering major events and tourist-facing activities. But they have editorial teams of limited size covering an enormous country. They cannot list the ceramics market in a Kyoto side street, the jazz bar in Osaka that hosts a special live set on the second Thursday of every month, or the gallery in Namba that just opened a show by a local artist. For concerts specifically, tickets for Japan's most popular artists are almost never sold through English portals — these are reserved for the domestic market and distributed via lottery systems on the main Japanese sites.
Google Translate Has Changed Things
The single most practical tool for finding Japanese events is your phone's camera combined with Google Translate. Point it at any Japanese sign, flyer, or poster and it translates in real time. This works on restaurant boards, event notices posted outside venues, and flyers handed out in the street. It is imperfect but functional enough to understand what an event is, where it is, and when it happens. For websites, Chrome's built-in translation feature converts entire Japanese pages to English with a single click.
Peatix and What It Covers
The event ticketing platform Peatix — Japan's largest for independent events — works well with browser translation. Search Peatix in Japanese (ピーティックス) and browse by region. You will find events that no English-language site has covered. Peatix has also launched a Visiting Japan portal, which allows international visitors to find and book events in multiple languages, with Japanese organisers able to have their listings translated automatically.
Following Local Venues on Social Media
Many of the best small venues in Japan — jazz bars, art galleries, independent theatres, local restaurants — announce events only on Instagram or X, in Japanese. If you find a venue you like, follow its Japanese social media account and use the translation feature when posts appear. A small jazz bar in Kyoto's Gion district may have no English presence whatsoever but will announce a special performance the night before it happens. This is the closest thing to having a local friend who tells you where to go.
What We Do
What's On Japan exists because this problem is real and frustrating. We scan Japanese-language event sources across the country every day — venue websites, ticketing platforms, local blogs, city ward announcements — and translate them into English so you do not have to. The events in our listings are drawn from sources that most English-speaking visitors would never find on their own, not because the information is hidden, but because it was never intended to reach a non-Japanese audience.
Browse by city, filter by category, and if you know of an event we have missed, submit it using the link below. The more people who contribute, the more complete the picture becomes. Japan is too good to experience only the parts that have been translated for you.
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