When is not busy Winter Season

Well, my 24-day japan trip will end very soon. I am coming home tomorrow morning :-(.

I want to go again this year when it is not too warm. I really enjoyed cold weather of this February. I am currently considering of going again in November. I was wondering is this going to be busy tourist season? During this trip, I didn't know about 3-day weekend 2/9~2/11. I was in Hokkaido and it was very busy. I had some problem reserving JR train seats from Hakodate to Tokyo. Eventually I got my green car seats but I had to adjust my time, and make additional stop and change train. I want to avoid this again. Also I want to avoid paying much higher hotel costs. In this trip, I got relatively good hotel prices except the hotels in Hokkaido because of snow festival but it was worth it btw :-)

Thanks

in Nov busy "Kyoto" only.
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3953.html

But no problem than Sapporo.
access way a lot.

As you hint at in your post, 3-day weekends tend to be busier since people can travel more then. We went to Kyoto at the beginning of the fall foliage season, and even then I didn't think it was too crowded during the work week. I think you have to worry mostly about weekends during this time period.

We went at the end of November but got to Kyoto on about 3 December last year. It wasn't busy at all save with the usual Japanese school trips, but autumn had pretty much finished by the time we hit Kyoto. It was very cold, in fact I think it snowed in Kyoto the day after we left for Korea on the 8th December. There weren't many europeans around at the time either