Koromogae: The Art of Dressing with the Seasons

Zen Gaijin
4 days ago
9 min read

How a 1,200-year-old Japanese custom reveals something profound about a country you thought you already knew.

Four folded autumn kimono fabric panels in purple, red, orange, and gold with maple leaf motifs displayed side by side. — Four seasonal kimono silks — autumn maple motifs woven into purple, red, orange, and gold — each fabric a calendar in itself.

So you’re standing on a Tokyo street corner in early June and you notice something you can’t quite put your finger on. Somehow the city feels different, seems changed. The salarymen emerging from the subway stations look different—lighter, brighter somehow. The schoolchildren filing past the shrine gates wear different uniforms than the ones they wore just the week before. The department store windows have undergone an overnight transformation, with the mannequins now suddenly clad in linen and pale cotton.

You aren’t imagining things. You simply are experiencing Japan’s wonderful cultural tradition of taking mundane activities of daily living and transforming them into national rituals and celebrations. What you experienced on that Tokyo street corner has been repeated all over Japan. It’s called Koromogae (衣替え).

It’s Japan’s ancient, still-vibrant tradition of the seasonal changing of clothes. In western culture, when it starts to get warmer, we move the puffy coats to the back of the closet and pull out the light windbreakers and cotton shirts without thinking much about it. In Japan, the changing of seasons translates into a formal transformation of attire and dress norms, one to be celebrated and enjoyed.

If you are in Japan during this twice-yearly event and don’t even notice it, you’re certainly not alone. Most visitors are unaware of Koromogae’s cultural significance. But for those of us who have returned to Japan more than once, who make a point of slowing down enough to see the country’s calmer cultural counterpoints, Koromogae is one of those quiet revelations that makes you understand—and appreciate—Japan just a little more deeply.

Japanese high school girls summer uniforms walking street lush green trees early June koromogae — High school girls in crisp summer whites, the city’s green canopy overhead, June announced not by the calendar but by what everyone is wearing.

What Koromogae Actually Is

Koromogae literally means “changing clothes.” But that translation, while accurate, fails to express the nuances of this powerful historical custom.

Koromogae is not the same as cleaning out your closet on a rainy afternoon because your sweaters no longer fit or the thermometer has started creeping upward. In Japan, this is a synchronized, culturally sanctioned, near-nationwide act of seasonal acknowledgment—performed on two specific dates each year.

Japanese woman hands carefully folding red kimono washi paper seasonal storage koromogae tradition — The private heart of koromogae: a winter kimono folded into washi paper for summer storage — cedar-scented, carefully laundered, set aside until October calls it back

On June 1st, summer clothing comes out. On October 1st, the lighter clothing is folded away and the heavier fabrics return. School students make the switch en masse, as a student body. Government offices mandate different attire collectively as an institution. Companies send the memo to all departments. And families follow their own domestic version of the same rhythm, pulling cedar-scented boxes from storage, shaking out carefully laundered garments, and reinstating the wardrobe of the coming season.

The June date is not a coincidence—it aligns with the onset of tsuyu, Japan’s rainy season, when rising humidity makes proper wool and silk storage a matter of practical necessity as much as seasonal ritual.

Koromogae dates are not entirely uniform across the archipelago. In Hokkaido, for example, where summers arrive later and cooler, the switch typically runs from June 15 to September 15. In the warmer southwestern regions, summer clothes may come out as early as May 1st and remain in circulation through November. Japan’s geography, in other words, influences even its most prescriptive traditional rituals.

At its heart, a collective act of attention.

A Thousand Years of Changing with the Seasons

The origins of Koromogae reach back to the Heian period (794–1185), when the ritual arrived in Japan as part of the rich cultural exchange with China. At the imperial court, it became a highly formalized ceremony—nobles changed not merely their clothing but their color palettes, their textile weights, and their accessories, swapping bamboo-and-paper kawahori fans for the formal cypress hiōgi as the seasons turned. In those early centuries, this practice of sartorial transformation took place as many as five times a year.

Heian-period illustrated manuscript depicting the imperial koromogae ceremony with court figures and the same ceremonial patterned textile still used at Kyoto Imperial Palace today. — The same ceremonial textile visible in both centuries: a Heian court illustration documenting the imperial koromogae at the Seiryōden — the red and black pattern unchanged from the 9th century to the present day.

Palace conservators install seasonal ceremonial textiles at the Seiryōden, Kyoto Imperial Palace — a tradition unbroken since the Heian period.

Ancient Japanese imperial court manuscript illustration koromogae ceremony Seiryoden Heian period seasonal textile — Heian-period illustrated manuscript documenting the imperial koromogae at the Seiryoden — the same ceremony, the same ceremonial textile, centuries apart.

Over time, as Japan shaped the custom to its own sensibilities, the practice of Koromogae simplified. By the Edo period (1603–1867), the Tokugawa Shogunate had codified it into a regulation for the samurai class: four changes per year. Ordinary people, as they so often did with samurai customs, quietly adopted it as their own.

Then in 1873, as the Meiji government introduced sweeping modernization into Japan and adopted the Gregorian calendar, Koromogae was streamlined further—to twice a year, June and October, dates that persist to this day.

Today, a custom that began in silk-draped palace chambers now plays out in high school locker rooms, corporate HR memos, and kitchen closets across the country. That continuity—from Heian courtiers to Heisei salarymen—is really quite extraordinary, and has become yet another thread woven into the fabric of Japanese national identity.

More Than Clothes

Here is where Koromogae becomes interesting to the culturally curious visitor.

Among Japan’s formal traditions, particularly in the tea ceremony, the change of seasons is not a passive experience—it is choreographed. The kimono worn to a tea gathering in September is different from the one worn in October, not just in warmth but in motif, in textile, in the invisible grammar of appropriateness. The utensils used in the tearoom also shift with the season. The hanging scroll in the tokonoma changes. The seasonal flower in the vase changes.

Even the tea ceremony speaks the season's language: Left: a light summer kimono with bold peonies, Right: a heavy autumn silk with restrained florals — and an iron kama (pot) reserved for cooler months.

Koromogae is an expression of this same sensibility, applied to daily life. By changing one’s wardrobe on a set date—collectively, deliberately—Japanese society performs a small but meaningful act of alignment with the natural world. One’s clothes are not merely reacting to the weather; they are anticipating the season. Welcoming it. Making space for it.

This is very different from the way most of us in the West relate to our wardrobes, where our choices relate to utility, not custom. We might reach for a lighter jacket when we notice it’s warm, or dig out a scarf when we feel the first chill. In Japan, the act of changing precedes the full arrival of the season. It is a kind of cultural preparation—a willingness to welcome what is coming.

There’s an important word that gets used often in discussions of Japanese aesthetics: Ma (間). Ma refers to the meaningful pause, the space between things. Koromogae is a kind of calendared Ma—a pause between seasons in which one consciously participates in the eternal progression of the seasons, rather than merely living through it.

because the season changes, so do our clothes - the hearts of people in this world are changeable like blossom-dyed sleeves Shunzei's Daughter (c. 1171 - c. 1252) 俊成女

The deliberate care of koromogae: a conservator ties ceremonial textiles at the Kyoto Imperial Palace. The same knot, tied the same way, on the same date — for over a thousand years.

What Climate Change Is Doing to Koromogae

One cannot discuss Koromogae without acknowledging the tension the custom is experiencing due to modern climatic conditions.

Woman in white summer blouse holds a blue-patterned parasol on a crowded Tokyo street during a summer heatwave. — *parasol against a Tokyo summer that arrives earlier every year — koromogae holding its dates while the climate rewrites the calendar.*

Japan’s summers are arriving earlier and staying longer. The pleasant, temperate June climate that shaped the tradition’s form and expression has, in many recent years, been replaced by oppressive heat weeks before the official switch date. Many Japanese people—particularly younger generations living in cities—have responded by adjusting their personal koromogae earlier, or adapted it into a rolling, informal transition rather than a single set date. A recent survey by Daiwa House found that 44% of people now switch gradually as the weather shifts, while 36% still observe the traditional twice-yearly swap.

As a consequence, some companies are moving away from strict uniform date mandates. The “Super Cool Biz” initiative, introduced in 2011 following the Fukushima disaster, when electricity conservation became critical, encouraged workers to dress more casually in summer—loosening the formal protocols that had governed office attire for generations.

But still: walk past almost any school in Japan on June 1st and you will see the students in summer uniforms. The custom persists, unquestionably because the Japanese people want it to. Its formal edges may have blurred, as they inevitably must when a practice conceived for a cooler world meets a warming one. But its deeper cultural logic—that the seasons deserve to be met with intention, that collective ritual has value, that there is something worth marking in the turning of the year—persists.

How to See It When You’re There

Koromogae won’t appear on any tourist itinerary. There’s no location to visit, no festival to attend. But once you’re aware of its existence, you’ll take notice of its various manifestations.

Japanese elementary school children winter uniforms navy Nara November koromogae seasonal change ginkgo leaves — Nara, November: the ancient capital's school children in winter uniform, ginkgo leaves marking the season underfoot — koromogae visible in the oldest city in Japan.

If you’re traveling in late May or late September, you’ll see diverse signs of the preparation for Koromogae—the department stores already revamping their displays, the dry cleaners becoming impossibly busy, the school uniforms beginning their seasonal transition. Then, as you travel in early June or early October, you’ll witness the entirety of the switch itself, playing out simultaneously in every school corridor, office building, public space, and neighborhood.

We suggest you visit a traditional kimono shop and ask about the seasonal kimono calendar. The proprietor’s eyes are likely to light up. This is a subject most foreign visitors seldom raise, and it opens a window into the entire world of textile knowledge—which fabrics belong to which months, which motifs carry which seasonal meanings, why a hitoe (unlined kimono) is correct for June and September but not July, and why wearing the wrong fabric at the wrong time is not merely unfashionable or a cultural gaffe, but rather something deeper: a kind of disharmony.

If you are fortunate enough to participate in a tea ceremony during your travels, take note of what the host wears. Read the room for what season it speaks to. The conversation between clothing, season, and setting is always present—you simply need to know when and how to look for it.

A worker in a Coca-Cola uniform restocks a Japanese vending machine with cold drinks on a Tokyo street, illustrating the seasonal changeover known as koromogae. — Nobody announces it. A Tokyo vending machine worker quietly swaps the winter hot drinks for cold ones — koromogae playing out in one of its least celebrated, most ubiquitous forms.

The same attentiveness extends further than you might expect. Notice the vending machines as June approaches: the rows of hot canned coffee and warm green tea that sustained the city through winter quietly disappear, replaced almost overnight by cold drinks and chilled teas. Nobody announces it. It simply happens. Japan takes its seasons seriously—and once you start looking, you’ll find koromogae everywhere.

What Koromogae Teaches the Patient Visitor

Japan is extraordinarily adept at layering meaning beneath the surface of ordinary acts.

And that’s what keeps drawing us back, isn’t it? The sense that there is always more to understand—that the country is not withholding its secrets and charms, exactly, but that its depths reveal themselves only gradually, and only to those persistently curious enough to keep looking.

Yes, Koromogae is a small thing. It is also a window into the Japanese relationship with time, with nature, with collective belonging, with the idea that even the most mundane act—putting on a different jacket—can be infused with intention and cultural significance.

The next time you land in Japan and step out into a city that feels subtly, unmistakably different from your prior experience, look at what people are wearing. Take note of whether the school uniforms have changed. Pay attention to the department store windows.

The incoming seasons are being welcomed. And now you will be slightly richer because you know how to welcome them too.

Woman in a deep rose autumn kimono performs a traditional Japanese tea ceremony with an iron kettle and red lacquer water bucket overlooking a garden. — The patient visitor learns to read what the host is wearing — the fabric weight, the motif, the obi — before the first bowl of tea is served.

Have you witnessed examples of Koromogae during your own travels in Japan? Have they varied from area to area, city to city? We’d love to hear your anecdotes. Drop us a note or share your experience in the comments below.

Picture Sources:

Kyoto Imperial Palace photographs courtesy of the Imperial Household Agency — kyoto-gosho.kunaicho.go.jp