28th April – 卯月
From the end of April to the start of May, Japan has huge continuous public holiday, called ゴールデンウィーク (Golden Week). This holiday consists of 昭和の日 (Showa no hi, 29th),憲法記念日 (Kenpou Kinenbi, 3rd), みどりの日 (Midori no hi, 4th), こどもの日 (Kodomo no hi, 5th).
Japanese society is generally considered to be hard to get the continuous holidays in businesses. Therefore, many people take long vacation during Golden week. Now Japan is concerned about the movement people will take while Golden week this year, due to the Covid-19. There has been an alert that strongly recommending not to travel around, however it is reported that about 60,000 people have booked tourism related holiday to Okinawa during this period. Hopefully they will change their mind.
Why is it called as Golden week?
It is believed that this word came from movie industry in Japan. In the past, the movies which were published in this long holiday got very good number of visitors to the movie theaters. Taking the radio industry jargon ‘Golden hour’, meaning of the time when there are the highest volume of listeners (19:00~22:00) and named it as Golden week. By 1952, this term was widely used even to public.
It used to be called 飛び石連休 (Tobiishi Renkyuu, Stepping stone holiday), as there are non-public holidays between those days (30th, 1st and 2nd), plus there used to have Saturday works / schools. However, the law changed in 1985 determining Saturday as a day off and if there are non-public holiday between public holidays, make the day between as holiday too.
After Golden week, the next public holiday jumps to Monday 3rd week of July (海の日, Umi no hi), so it is good to take a rest while Golden week and be ready for the hectic work months!
Little Japan Dictionary 