What I Actually Buy for a Japanese Summer (and What to Skip)

Japan · Summer · What to Pack

By Nobu · Updated June 2026

A Japanese summer is hot and wet — Tokyo runs near a 31°C high and about 74% humidity through August — and after years of it I’ve boiled my kit down to a handful of things actually worth having. Almost all of them you can buy once you land, often at a convenience store; a few are worth ordering to your hotel before you arrive. Here’s what earns its place in my bag, what a konbini already covers, and what’s not worth the suitcase space.

The heat is the whole game. It isn’t the temperature on its own — it’s the humidity sitting on top of it, the kind that has you damp by the time you’ve walked from the station to the shrine. The Japanese summer market has spent decades solving exactly this, which is why the good stuff is cheap, everywhere, and genuinely better than what I used to bring from home. So I pack light and buy on the ground.

Beating the heat

Three small things do most of the work. The one you’ll see on every commuter’s neck is the PCM cooling neck ring — a loop of phase-change gel that you freeze overnight (or drop in cold tap water) and wear; it holds cold for an hour or two with no battery. It looks odd the first day and obvious by the third. Alongside it, a small rechargeable handheld fan is the summer accessory in Japan now, clipped to bags or worn on a neck strap; a USB-C one lasts a full day of sightseeing.

The third is the one I’d genuinely skip pre-buying: menthol body sheets. One large wipe cools your whole back and they’re a real Japanese summer ritual — but every convenience store sells them, so grab a pack when you land rather than carrying them. Same goes for the blue cooling gel sheets you stick on your forehead or neck on a brutal afternoon: nice to have, but a drugstore two minutes away has them.

Sun, salt & bugs

Japanese sunscreen is one of the few things I’d actively recommend buying here even to take home — the high-SPF formulas are lighter and less greasy than most of what I grew up with, and a long summer day on your feet needs it. Pair it with a folding umbrella: in Japan it doubles as a sun parasol, and on the hottest days you’ll see plenty of locals walking under one. It earns its place in the bag because it covers both the sun and the sudden afternoon downpour.

Heat-stroke — necchūshō — is taken seriously here, and the local answer is salt. Salt and electrolyte tablets are carried by schoolkids and construction crews alike; a few in your pocket on a hiking or festival day is a sensible, very Japanese habit. (A konbini bottle of OS-1 or Pocari Sweat does the same job if you’d rather not pack them.) And if you’re heading anywhere green — temples, the countryside, a riverside festival — a stick of insect repellent is worth having; Japanese summer mosquitoes find ankles fast.

When it rains

June is the rainy season (tsuyu), and typhoons can roll through from late summer, so rain is part of the deal. The folding umbrella above covers most of it, but if you’re doing anything active — a hike, an outdoor festival, a boat — a thin rain poncho packs down to nothing and keeps your hands and camera free in a way an umbrella can’t. It lives in my day bag from June onward and weighs almost nothing.

The short list

What I skip

Plenty of “Japan summer” buys aren’t worth it. Generic cooling towels are just no-name imports — the PCM ring is the Japanese version worth having. Festival yukata sets sold online are usually thin polyester that runs small; renting or buying one in Japan is the real experience, not a parcel. The fragile, famous souvenirs — Tokyo Banana, fresh wagashi — aren’t reliably or freshly sold online, so buy those at a depachika or the airport on the way out. And anything from a 100-yen shop (mini fans, cheap sprays) is part of the fun to buy in person once you’re here.

The flavours I bring home

The other half of a Japanese summer is what you eat and drink, and most of it is better bought fresh than shipped. Mugicha — ice-cold roasted-barley tea — is the taste of the season, and the cold-brew tea bags are flat, light and easy to tuck into a bag for home. Glass-bottle ramune with the marble stopper is the festival drink; chilled somen noodles are the meal. I buy these at supermarkets and konbini as I go rather than online — they’re cheap, everywhere, and part of the trip — and bring home only what packs flat. If there’s one re-orderable souvenir worth it later, it’s the Japan-only KitKat flavours, matcha above all.

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