Japan at Christmas?!

[MarinadeRoulade]

Hi we’re thinking of doing Japan at Christmas. We want to do disneyland and nintendo land at universal. What I’m not sure on is: what sort of weather/temperatures should we expect? What sort of itinerary would work best? Would you do a few days in Tokyo for Disney then base in Osaka or somewhere else for Universal? We’ve been to Osaka before, pre-kids, and I feel like we did everything we could, so not sure there’s much else for us to do there unless it’s changed massively in 7 years. We’ve got up to two weeks (school hols) with a 4 and 6 year old, and we live on the same side of the world so jet lag not much of a factor. We didn’t want to do hk disney as accommodation seems sooo expensive unless anyone has budget hotel recs for hk then we could cut Tokyo and just go to Universal this time. Shanghai disneyland is right out as it doesn’t have a Frozen kingdom and our 4yo wants to visit Elsa.

Are you planning for 2026?

Japan has wonderful dry winters, cold perhaps 4-10°C but blue skies almost every day. It's my favourite time to be there. Wonderful powder snow for the skiers.

Fly into Tokyo, eat really well, do Disneyland, sightsee, for 2-3 days, go out to Hakone, see the mountains, perhaps stay overnight at an obseb hotel. Then hop on the shinkansen to Osaka, eat really well, do universal studios. Go over to historic Kyoto and portside Kobe as overnight trips.

You can keep the kids entertained by taking in the excellent science museums and art galleries in Osaka. And perhaps some baseball, basketball, volleyball, sumo, etc Japan has active major leagues in a lot of sports and hosts major global and regional championships. The kids like events.

Always loads to do in Japan - and wonderful food.

It's fairly chilly in Japan in winter, highs of around 11 in the middle of the day, I think warm coat, hat, gloves type weather as likely closer to 5 degrees when you are queuing to go in. Disney in Japan is very very busy, I assume you've looked at the app, people queue 3+ hours in the standby line for the Frozen ride in DisneySea at busy times. Fastpasses for this ride are quite hard to get without having happy entry from a Disney hotel or lining up early to queue for ages to get in. Even on a quieter day standby queue is typically 100+ minutes for Frozen, average queue in October was 139 minutes. It's a great ride, and Peter Pan is even better, both are entirely in Japanese, but you can still tell when they sing let it go in Japanese. We did love our time at both DisneySea and Disneyland and I would go back in a flash. Assuming you are in Oz, I would visit first week in Jan onwards when the Christmas rush will have peaked. Have you visited Mount Koya? It's not in Osaka but it's accessible from there and one of my favourite places in Japan, admittedly I went in late May not winter. As for Hong Kong, I think the queues will be shorter for Frozen and the ride will have some English. We stayed at Novotel at Tung Chung but Sheraton I think will let you all stay in one room. Tung Chung offers easy access to the metro to get to Disney and the city.

My experience is out of date but remember that the Japanese don’t really “do” Christmas like we do. It’s a normal working day. You will see decorations up in shops though. This might work to your advantage

weather in Tokyo can be great at Christmas. Cold crisp days when you can see Mount Fuji. High single figures is usual for temperatures. Winter is much nicer than summer. They get their sunshine in winter and endlesss days of grey in summer.

if You want snow you can get up to the ski resorts on the Shinkansen easily. Never seen such good snow as I have in Japan.

never been to Tokyo Disney but Universal Osaka is good fun

Hi, thanks for all the replies. As long as it’s dry/not raining I think we could make those sort of tempetatures work. The kids aren’t that into rides, they will mostly want to go for atmosphere/to meet characters. Probably the Frozen ride is the only big one they would want to do. Last time I went to Osaka we went to Universal and it wasn’t as big as I had expected, but that was before they opened Nintendo Land. @Clearinguptheclutter I like spending Christmas in countries that don’t really celebrate it. What we really want is no more rain and we seem to be having an endless rainy season in southeast asia this year! @FrauPaige we’re living only a few hours away by plane, so we don’t need to do everything all at once. Aside from the big science museum near the river, which is quite interactive, what other science museums have you seen in Osaka? I don’t remember any others (billions of onsen though). General museums/art galleries didn’t go so well in London in summer. @Nestoe this is for 2025. Flights from here are plentiful, short and cheap. @TeamGeriatric Thank you so much for your detailed info! Which app? We have never done any disneyland before, all I know is you buy a ticket (possibly in advance) and go. We don’t mind it not being in English and my Japanese is passable to get around/read menus etc. Those queues don’t sound good though. What is a standby queue? Is that for single riders? We have appalling internet here and I am really struggling to get the various Disney websites to load as they seem quite video-heavy.

@Clearinguptheclutter can you recommend a nice ski resort we could potentially visit for a day trip? DS can ski a little so might like that.

You can go to Gala Yuzawa by shinkansen very easily to ski.

Re science museums, every city has them - Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe.

Worked over there - both in Tokyo and Osaka. Had young kid in tow in one stint.

Thank you! So amazing that you worked over there! We always seem to end up working in China - this is our second rodeo. 😅 It makes South/East Asia very accessible, but much harder to quickly plan trips without Google! Last time we did Osaka, I was pg with DS and the hotel offered tacoyaki for breakfast every day so we joke that DS is part octopus.

Oh, so you know the drill! I do enjoy working in Asia. I'm usually based in the APAC hubs (of which Tokyo is my fave), but I'm actively suggesting that my assistance is needed in Shanghai 😉 I'm glad that your son took to takoyaki - he has good taste! Enjoy that second stint - you lucky so and so!

KFC is the traditional Christmas Day dinner in Japan 🤣

Go for it, sounds perfect for you.
Have some Christmas strawberry shortcake for me (strawberry is the Christmas sweet decoration).

I don’t ski but it would be a waste not to if you do.

Japan is lovely at xmas! Because everywhere is still open 😂

Yes I'd expect the queues to be quite long at Disney land and universal over Xmas but it should be less or a problem if you buy the express pass. And I find the queue for the kiddy rides at universal are faster moving than the adult rides. There's an aquarium in osaka that I always recommend to my friends with young children and they all love it. My children also really enjoyed the teamlab museum in Tokyo. If you have time take the shinkansen to nara to feed the deers! My girls did it for 3 days and refused to leave. Biwako valley is also near osaka for a skiing day trip.

According to the Tokyo Disney crowd calendar, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Christmas (up to Christmas Eve) are expected to be quiet days for crowding. It’s the week after that things will start to get busy. We went on days that this calendar said were green (same as 22nd, 23rd and 24th are showing this year) and we managed to ride every ride without any paid fast passes (only the free Anniversary priority passes). I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble with crowding if you go on the right days.

The beauty of Osaka for me isn’t the number of things to do in Osaka, but the number of things that are an easy day trip from Osaka. It’s a brilliant base for exploring. Nara, Kyoto, Kobe, Okayama, Kurashiki, Himeji Castle, Minnoh Falls, Katsuoji temple, Uji and Koyasan are all in really easy reach.

Will you be staying past new year? We’re planning on going for Christmas and New Year 2026-7 and my understanding is that the days around and following new year are the tricky ones for travellers because so many things shut down and are closed. Filling those days looks to be a bit trickier and inter-city transport is very busy.

https://yosocal.com

It's called the 'Tokyo Disney Resort App', I have android rather than apple, but it's just in the play store on Android. It has real time info on the queues and timings for parades etc. It's mostly useful when you are there, but if you open the app whenever the park is open so you can see what the queue is for Frozen in real time. That yosocal website recommended by previous poster was my favourite Tokyo Disney planning source of info though, as it has crowd calendar predictions and then actual crowd levels of the next tab, and it captures data for the queues observed for each ride every day and for each ride you can see queues across the entire month. That's where I pulled the average queue time for Frozen on 139 minutes from. I'm a data geek, I'm sorry. I do recommend you plan a bit, even if not to my extent, because it is busy and you need to know what to expect!