Does Japan have Lantern Festival?
Not observed here
There is no Lantern Festival in Japan, and the reason is not about whether Chinese communities are present: from the sixth year of Meiji the country moved to the solar calendar, and the old-calendar festivals were shifted wholesale onto the same numbered day of the new one. The fifteenth of the first month therefore became 15 January — a date now remembered as the old Coming-of-Age Day, with nothing to do with lanterns. Not one of the sixteen holidays in the Act follows the phases of the moon. The lantern events in the Yokohama and Kobe Chinatowns run as usual, but they belong to those neighbourhoods, not to the holiday table.
What is this topic?
The same lunar date is three different scenes in Taiwan alone — eating tangyuan and walking through a lantern display, releasing sky lanterns in Pingxi, or standing inside a wall of exploding fireworks in Yanshui — while in mainland China it is a working day, not one of the days off for all citizens. This page compares ritual intensity and civic status under one calendar date.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.