Tokyo pollen season when you've never had hay fever

You booked a Tokyo apartment for March and April, and someone in a forum has told you that you will spend both months sneezing. You have never had hay fever anywhere, not once, so you do not know whether to believe it or what to pack.

I am not a doctor, and none of this is medical advice. I have been to Japan eight times and lived in Tokyo once for 90 days, and three of those trips landed inside pollen season. Two friends who had never reacted to anything in their lives started sneezing in their first Tokyo spring, one of them in her second week. A third friend spent four months here starting in February and felt nothing at all. So the honest answer to "will this happen to me" is that nobody can tell you in advance. What you can do is learn the shape of the season and where the medicine is, and both are cheaper to learn now than in week two.

There is a test, and it runs after you land rather than before. Second week of March, itchy eyes, no fever, and it does not clear in a few days. That is pollen and not a cold, and it is the one result that changes what you should do. If it is not you, skip most of what follows. If it is you, the fix is a ten-minute walk to a drugstore, not something you should have packed.

Cedar comes first and cypress runs later, which is why two weeks is the wrong estimate

Tokyo counts pollen at 12 sites across the city and publishes the windows. スギ (sugi — Japanese cedar) runs from early February to late April and peaks around March. ヒノキ (hinoki — Japanese cypress) starts in mid-March and runs to mid-May, peaking from late March into April. Those are the city's own figures on its allergy information page, which also notes that cypress runs about a month behind cedar.

The reason this matters is not that they are two separate lotteries. Tokyo's own pollen booklet explains that people who react to cedar often react to cypress as well, because the two trees are closely related and the part of the pollen that sets off the allergy is similar in both. Cedar drops off during April. Cypress keeps going into May. So a person who reacts to both gets one long season rather than two short ones, and "it will pass in two weeks" turns out to be the most common wrong thing said about this.

This past spring shows how loosely the forecast holds. In January the city predicted the season would open around 10 to 12 February and that the total would land near 1.4 times the previous spring. Cedar pollen was first recorded on 13 February, one day earlier than the ten-year average, so the date was close. The total was not: it came in at 1.8 times the previous spring and 1.5 times the ten-year average. By 13 May, cedar had finished at all 12 sites and cypress had finished at nine of them. Three sites were still counting cypress in the middle of May.

The people who get caught are the ones with no history

Tokyo has surveyed this. Its most recent patient survey estimates that 48.8% of people in Tokyo, excluding the islands, have cedar pollen allergy, and the city notes the figure has risen at every survey since the series began in 1983. By age band it is 61.6% for people between 15 and 29, and 57.0% for people between 30 and 44. Those are the ages most people doing a Tokyo work stint fall into. Nationally, the Ministry of the Environment's 2022 manual puts cedar pollen allergy at 38.8% as of 2019, close to one person in three.

Your history at home predicts less than you would think, because you have probably not met this pollen before. 花粉症 (kafunshō — "pollen sickness," the Japanese word for hay fever) is specific to the thing you react to, and cedar and cypress are planted across most of Japan in a way they are not anywhere else you have lived. A two-week trip in April is also a small sample. You may have been here in a light week, or in a low year, or indoors for most of it.

The test at the top of this article is not folk wisdom. Colds and pollen season overlap in Tokyo in March and the first few days look alike either way. The Ministry of the Environment's manual gives the difference plainly: with hay fever the eyes usually itch, and unlike a cold, you do not run a high temperature. The same manual says to see an ear, nose and throat doctor or an eye doctor when symptoms are bad, and that is still the right thing to do if it gets bad.

The drugstore shelf is the part nobody warns you about

This is where the usual advice about medicine and Japan runs backwards. Japan has moved a long list of antihistamines out of prescription-only and onto the open shelf. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare publishes the list of ingredients that made that switch, and as of 1 July 2026 it includes fexofenadine, cetirizine, loratadine, epinastine, ebastine, bepotastine, ketotifen, azelastine and mequitazine. Nine of them, no prescription.

Some of those you can buy at home as well. Some you cannot buy at home at any price. Epinastine and bepotastine appear in the United States FDA's approved-products database only as prescription eye drops, with no oral version listed at all. Ebastine returns no match in that database. In Tokyo they are tablets, on a shelf, in a shop that also sells shampoo.

The risk tier matters more here than the brand does. Japan sorts over-the-counter medicine into three classes. The fexofenadine tablets registered with the PMDA, Japan's drug regulator, sit at 第2類医薬品 (dai-ni-rui iyakuhin — "class 2 medicine," the middle tier). Class 2 and class 3 can be sold by a 登録販売者 (tōroku hanbaisha — registered seller, a licensed non-pharmacist), not only by a pharmacist. That is why the counter staff at an ordinary drugstore can sell you one at 9pm on a Sunday. Class 1 is the tier that needs a pharmacist on duty, and the pharmacist has to give you the information before the sale. When a box sits behind glass and the shop tells you to come back tomorrow, that is the reason.

Read what is on the box, because the boxes carry their own limits. The over-the-counter fexofenadine insert, for one, says it is not for children under 15. I am not going to tell you what to take or how much of it. That sits between you, the box, and a pharmacist, and any drugstore of real size has one somewhere in the building. What I will say is that the same Tokyo survey found 57.3% of people with symptoms never see a doctor about it, and 35.1% said self-care, over-the-counter medicine included, keeps their day normal. Plenty of people here handle it exactly this way. It is not a workaround.

You are allowed to bring your own, with one thing to check first. Japan Customs lets a traveler carry in up to a two-month supply of ordinary over-the-counter medicine, and up to a one-month supply of prescription medicine, without a certificate. A plain antihistamine is ordinary medicine. A combination tablet that also clears a blocked nose might not be: Japan's narcotics regulator lists pseudoephedrine, the decongestant in a lot of foreign allergy and cold products, among the stimulant raw materials you need permission to bring in. That exemption is written as a concentration limit rather than a list of brands, so no official page will tell you whether your particular box is fine. It is a lot of homework to avoid a ten-minute walk. A prescription antihistamine you already take at home is a different question again with its own paperwork, and it is covered in the guide on bringing prescription medication for a longer stay.

Peak weeks take the balcony away, and that is what reshapes your week

The part that surprised me had nothing to do with my nose. Japan's official guidance for pollen season is to stop drying laundry and bedding outside. The Ministry of the Environment manual says it flatly: to avoid carrying pollen into the house, do not hang laundry or futons outdoors. Tokyo's own booklet is a shade softer and more useful. Dry laundry indoors as much as you can during the season, use a futon dryer rather than the rail, and if something has been outside, vacuum it, because that takes a fair amount of the pollen back off.

Look at your unit's appliance list before you book. If it has a washing machine and no separate dryer, the balcony rail is your dryer, and for roughly six weeks in spring the official advice is not to use it. Three places to put the laundry instead, in the order I would try them:

• The bathroom ceiling unit. Many Tokyo bathrooms have a panel with a 乾燥 (kansō — dry) button, a 浴室乾燥機 (yokushitsu kansōki — bathroom dryer). Fill the rail, shut the door, run it overnight. Ask whether the unit has one if the listing does not say. It is the one appliance that changes how these six weeks feel.
• An indoor rack. 部屋干し (heyaboshi — drying indoors) on a folding stand works, and works better with the bathroom fan running and the door open. Give it a full day rather than a night.
• A coin laundry. コインランドリー (koin randorī — coin laundry) machines are gas-fired and finish a load properly, which matters most for bedding you cannot hang anywhere.

Now the part where two pieces of good advice disagree. The standing rule for a Tokyo apartment in damp months is to open the windows and move air through, because that is how you keep mold off the walls, and the rainy-season guide is built on it. In March and April that rule runs straight into this one. The Ministry of the Environment put a number on both sides: at peak season, one hour with the windows wide open in a single three-bedroom apartment let in something on the order of ten million grains of pollen. Open the window about 10cm instead, with a lace curtain drawn across it, and the amount getting in falls to roughly a quarter.

So you still ventilate. You do it through a hand's width of window with the curtain shut, for longer, instead of throwing the whole sash open for an hour. Then vacuum, because what does get in lands on the floor and the curtains and stays there.

If your dates land anywhere between February and May

Three things, none of them expensive.

Ask about the bathroom dryer before you book, if the listing does not already say. It is one line in an email and it decides whether laundry is solved or a daily problem for six weeks.

Arrive with nothing extra in your bag. If symptoms start, walk to a drugstore in the first week rather than the third. There is more choice on the shelf here than where you came from, most of it can be sold to you by ordinary counter staff, and a pharmacist is in the building for the rest.

And if you are timing the trip around cherry blossom, know that you are timing it around the overlap. Late March into April is cypress at its peak and cedar at its tail. Which ward you choose will not move that. Tokyo's pollen pages are explicit that cedar and cypress pollen travel very long distances, unlike the summer and autumn pollens that only reach as far as the plants growing nearby.

Two of the friends I mentioned now spend every Japanese spring on an antihistamine they had never heard of before they came here. Both bought it in the first week, in a shop that was open, from a person standing right there. Neither of them packed a thing.

— HalfKey runs furnished Tokyo apartments for stays of 30 days to 12 months. Browse listings for your dates.