The year in Ishikawa, month by month
Figures are from the Kanazawa station, Japan Meteorological Agency 1991–2020 series: 2,401.5 millimetres a year over 177.3 rainy days, 1,714.1 hours of sun and 157 centimetres of total snowfall. The scoring weighs what each month reveals of the territory, not just the weather.
Across most of the temperate world, thunderstorms belong to summer: afternoon heat, towering clouds, a downpour and that is that. On the Ishikawa coast the calendar runs the other way. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency reference values for 1991–2020, Kanazawa records 45.1 days with thunder a year, and the two months with the most are December, with 8.4, and January, with 7.9. July and August together do not reach 7.
It is not a quirk of the capital. In Wajima, on the northern coast of the Noto Peninsula, the pattern repeats: 5.6 days of thunder in December and 5.8 in November, against 3.3 in August. It is the signature of winter along the whole Sea of Japan coast, and the best way into how the year works in this elongated prefecture, which runs from the Kaga plains in the south to the tip of Noto some 150 kilometres north, with the Hakusan massif closing the horizon to the east.
01 Eight days of thunder in December
The explanation lies in the sea. From November, cold air coming down from the continent crosses the Sea of Japan, which still holds summer warmth. The contrast loads the clouds reaching the coast with moisture and instability, and they break as showers, hail and lightning. That is why thunder here does not announce heat but the change of season.
The Hokuriku coast named them long ago. The thunderstorms of late autumn and early winter are called buri-okoshi, «the ones that wake the yellowtail», because they coincide with the arrival of the buri shoals, Japanese amberjack or yellowtail, which move south through the Sea of Japan and reach this coast fattier than at any other time. Fishing tradition sums it up without statistics: when the thunder starts, the season starts.
For the traveller, this has a concrete translation. A December afternoon in Kanazawa can start with a clear spell, move on to a sharp thunderclap, turn to hail and end in sleet in less than an hour. It is not an unusual day. It is the season's typical day.
Key moments at a glance
On the 1st the Kenrokuen yukitsuri go up and on the 6th crab fishing opens. It rains on 17 days, but there are still 108.6 hours of sun.
The wettest month, 301.1 mm, and the stormiest. Last chance for the female crab, sold until the 29th.
207.2 hours of sun, 10.4 rainy days and 22.3 °C highs: the month to travel the coast and the peninsula.
231.9 mm and the most days above 30 mm, at 2.6. It is the month of the typhoon tails.
02 The wettest month is a winter month
Kanazawa receives 2,401.5 millimetres of precipitation a year, and the month that contributes most is not the rainy season but December, with 301.1. January follows with 256.0 and November with 250.8. June's tsuyu, which elsewhere in Japan is the great wet season, leaves 170.3 millimetres here: less than any of the three months of late autumn and winter.
What defines winter is not so much the amount as the frequency. January has 23.4 days with at least one millimetre and December 22.6: almost three days in four. In return, light drops to a minimum, with 62.3 hours of sun in January against 215.9 in August. The city has a saying that sums it up: «bentō wasuretemo kasa wasureru na», you can forget your lunch, but not your umbrella. Kanazawa's tourism association runs a free umbrella-lending service at points around the city, stocked with forgotten and donated umbrellas.
And part of that water arrives as snow, but a particular kind. January's mean low is 1.2 degrees and its mean high 7.1, so Kanazawa has only 8.7 days below freezing in January. Snowfall across the whole year adds up to 157 centimetres, with 67 in January and 53 in February, but it is heavy, wet snow, falling near melting point, weighing down branches and turning to water on the pavements. It is exactly the kind of snow that breaks trees.
03 The ropes arrive before the snow
Hence the yukitsuri, Kanazawa's best-known winter image. Every 1 November, the gardeners of Kenrokuen begin hanging hundreds of straw ropes from central poles, stretched taut to the pine branches, forming cones that spread the weight of the snow. The first is the Karasaki pine, beside the main pond, which takes some 800 ropes. The structures stay in place until mid-March.
The dates say a great deal. In November, when installation begins, Kanazawa's average monthly snowfall is one centimetre. Real snow does not arrive until December, with 24, and peaks in January. For more than a month, then, the ropes hang over green trees, with not a flake in sight. They do not react to winter: they anticipate it. And that, more than the snowy photograph, is what the garden tells you about the city.
The ropes at Kenrokuen do not react to winter: they anticipate it.
04 The sea opens on 6 November
The other date that orders winter is at the port. On 6 November, snow crab fishing, zuwaigani, opens in Ishikawa, and the calendar has two rhythms. The males, sold here as kanō-gani with a blue tag certifying that they were landed at a port in the prefecture, are fished until 20 March. The females, smaller and called kōbako-gani, can only be sold until 29 December.
That makes November and December a seven-week window that does not come round again during the year: the only time both forms of the crab are in the markets at once, overlapping with the season's first buri, whose best period runs from December to February. Outside that window, Ishikawa crab simply does not exist on the counter. Between 21 March and 5 November, the coast is closed to it.
05 Noto: the darkest winter and a territory under repair
To the north, the Noto Peninsula takes the coast's winter one step further. Wajima receives 2,162.3 millimetres a year and just 41.8 hours of sun in January, twenty fewer than Kanazawa; December, at 47.9, is barely better. It is the part of Ishikawa most exposed to the sea wind, and between mid-November and late February, on the rocky stretches of the northern coast such as Sosogi, pounding waves produce nami no hana, the «wave flower»: a dense white foam that forms in the cold, churned water and that the wind tears off the rocks.
Noto is also, in 2026, a territory under reconstruction. On 1 January 2024, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the peninsula, raised stretches of the northern coast by several metres and set off a fire in Wajima that razed the morning market district. In September of the same year, record rain, with more than 540 millimetres in 72 hours in Wajima, caused floods and landslides in the same areas. Both disasters claimed lives and left thousands of homes damaged.
Recovery is moving forward, but unevenly. The Wajima morning market operates provisionally, with some thirty stalls inside a shopping centre in the city. The reconstruction plan finalised in January 2026 places its return to the market street, alongside a covered plaza, around 2029–2030; on 13 September 2026 that street hosted a one-day market for the first time. At the Wakura hot spring resort, on Nanao Bay, the first fully rebuilt property was scheduled to reopen in July 2026. On the Shiroyone Senmaida terraced rice fields, where the earthquake cracked some 80 per cent of the plots, around 250 of them were planted again in 2025. If you travel to Noto, check in advance which accommodation and roads are running, and bear in mind that in many towns daily life is still shaped by the building work.
06 Summer looks upwards
When the coast calms down, the territory opens up on the other side. April and May are the most stable months of the year: May has 207.2 hours of sun and just 10.4 rainy days, and in Kanazawa the cherry trees usually bloom in early April, once the yukitsuri have come down. In June the mountains start to open: the Hakusan Shirakawa-go White Road, the toll road that crosses the Hakusan massif towards Gifu, runs only from early June to 10 November, because for the rest of the year snow closes it.
Summer, by contrast, is hot and humid. August is the sunniest month and the one with the fewest rainy days, 9.3, but also the warmest: a 31.3-degree average high and 21.5 days above 30. July adds up to 233.4 millimetres, and September, with 231.9, concentrates the year's heaviest downpours, with 2.6 days of more than 30 millimetres. On Noto, summer is the season of green: the terraced rice fields of the northern coast, ripening towards September, and long light over the sea.
07 How to choose the month
If you want to understand Ishikawa, go between early November and late December. It is the only stretch of the year when the freshly hung ropes at Kenrokuen, both crab seasons, the first buri and the thunder that names them all coincide. It is cold, but not yet January cold, and November still keeps 108.6 hours of sun. What you take away is the territory getting ready: the version that explains why this coast organises itself around winter.
What you lose is just as clear. It rains on more than half the days in November, and on almost three in four in December. Daylight is short and the White Road closes on 10 November, so the high mountains are out. If your trip is about walking the coast, touring Noto or climbing the Hakusan, May and October are better bets: the same territory with far more light and much less rain.
January and February are for those seeking snow in the garden and winter fish, knowing the sun barely shows. July and August are for the mountains and the green, at the cost of heat. And September is the month to avoid: it concentrates the year's most intense water, and on Noto the memory of 2024 is a reminder of what that can mean.
