Along with the New Year's holidays and obon, a four-day festival in August to honor one's ancestors, Golden Week is one of only three relatively long vacations that Japanese workers get every year.
If you ask me, Golden Week needs to be renamed. For one, Golden Week has nothing to do with gold. For two, you only get a maximum of three consecutive days off from work (not including Saturday and Sunday), not an entire week. Golden Week would only be "golden" if most workers were given Monday through Friday off every year, which would result in a lovely 9-day vacation.
Golden Week stretches from April 29 to May 5. Four of the seven days, April 29 and May 3, May 4, and May 5, are holidays. If you check your calendar, you'll see that this year, May 3 and May 4 fell on a Saturday and Sunday. So Golden Week turned out to be an Especially-Not-so-Golden-Week.
Luckily, however, there's at least a provision in the law that assures workers of a "real" day off if a holiday happens to fall on a Sunday. So this year that extended the holiday through Tuesday, May 6. Nevertheless, two days off (or, if you count the weekend, four days off), is hardly a week.
What's more, we actually had to come in to school on Saturday, May 3, since we had a type of open house that day. In lieu of having to work that day, we at least got Wednesday, May 7 off. But that still left us with only four consecutive days off, which is nowhere close to being a "golden" week.
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