Things to do in Tokyo this week

Tokyo’s Kameido Tenjin Shrine is famous for its wisteria flowers, and with good reason – the shrine has over 50 wisteria trees, which usually reach their flowering peak between late April and early May. 

This annual festival features a handful of food stalls and an evening light up from sunset until 9pm. The purple blooms also look quite stunning during the day when you can get a spectacular view of Tokyo Skytree in the background. The shrine is in the shitamachi (downtown) district of Tokyo, so while you’re here, make sure to take a stroll around the area to explore the old-fashioned local shops and eateries.

To check the current flowering status, visit the shrine's Instagram.

If you’re craving some Taiwanese food this spring, then drop by Tokyo Skytree Town for its Taiwan Festival. Head over to the fourth floor of Sky Arena until May 26 to feast on Taiwanese food throughout the day. There are several stalls offering popular Taiwanese cuisine such as lu rou fan (braised pork over rice) and da ji pai fried chicken.

You can also shop for Taiwanese goods and even enjoy massages and fortune telling. The dining area is decorated with red lanterns to give it a Taiwanese night market feel.

Tachikawa's Showa Kinen Park isn't content with merely hyping sakura: its Flower Festival takes place over three months and celebrates the blooms of tulips (in April), poppies and rapeseeds (May) and water lilies (May), of course in addition to the cherry blossoms in March and April.

2024 marks a special milestone for Showa Kinen Park, as the massive green space is celebrating its 40th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, park officials will be planting a staggering 1.8 million nemophila plants, which will turn into a gorgeous sea of blue once they bloom. 

Along with flower-viewing, the park will be hosting a number of floral-themed events, and dedicated photo spots will be set up on the premises. Photo sessions will include time to take pics among the park’s 250,000 colourful tulips without crowds in the background, while a special spot will allow you to capture the nemophila accented with soap bubbles.

The annual Fuji Shibazakura Festival is returning this spring with a staggering 500,000 pink, purple and white blooms from April 13 to May 26. With its seemingly endless fields of shibazakura (pink moss) and view of majestic Mt Fuji on the horizon, it's no wonder that this annual spring festival out at Lake Motosu in Yamanashi typically attracts hordes of Tokyoites over Golden Week. 

In addition to the eight kinds of shibazakura, you’ll get to see other colourful blooms like cherry blossoms, grape hyacinth, poppy anemone and forsythia. While you’re here, it’s also worth checking out the adjacent Peter Rabbit-themed English Garden, decorated with around 300 kinds of plants as well as figurines of the characters from the storybook. 

One of the best ways to get here is by highway bus. A round-trip ticket including festival entry fee starts from ¥7,800, with the bus departing from Bus Terminal Shinjuku, Mark City Shibuya, Futakotamagawa Rise and Tokyo Station. It takes you directly to the Fuji Shibazakura Festival in around two and a half hours. We recommend making reservations in advance because seats can fill up quickly during spring.

Otherwise, you can opt for the two-hour-long Limited Express Fuji Excursion train from Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko Station, and hop on the Fuji Shibazakura liner shuttle bus for another 50 minutes to get to the venue.

Held every second and fourth Sunday of the month, this antique market gathers around 70 vendors outside Shibuya Garden Tower. You’ll find all sorts of antiques and vintage handicrafts, jewellery, art, home goods, clothing, plants and organic food from all over the world. The market also features a few food and drink stalls, perfect for when you want a breather from all the shopping.

Note that the market will be cancelled in the case of rain.

While you’ll find an abundance of vintage and thrift stores in Shimokitazawa, the trendy neighbourhood also hosts a regular flea market at the Shimokita Senrosai open space, just a few minutes’ walk from the station. 

Expect to find all sorts of treasures and bargains including handmade crafts, jewellery and of course, secondhand and vintage clothing. If you're feeling peckish, the market also features a café as well as a lineup of food trucks selling snacks and refreshments.

Taking over the expansive outdoor lawn within the children’s play area at Meiji Shrine’s Outer Gardens, the Forest Beer Garden distinguishes itself from other boozy events in town with its lush green surrounds and bubbling waterfall.

The popular two-hour all-you-can-eat (¥5,880) option includes everything from barbecue beef, pork and lamb to veggies, yakisoba noodles, grilled onigiri and even ice pops. It includes an all-you-can-drink selection of seven kinds of beers including Kirin and Heineken, in addition to whisky, sours, wine and soft drinks. Despite being one of the largest beer gardens in Tokyo with a capacity for around 1,000 people, the event can get extremely busy at weekends, so advance bookings are recommended via the website.

The rooftop of Lumine Shinjuku has transformed into a beer garden where you can watch movies curated by Cinema Caravan, also known as the organisers of the annual Zushi Film Festival. You can choose from three kinds of cuisines – American, Korean or Mexican barbecue courses, all offered in light (from ¥5,390), standard (from ¥5,940) and premium (from ¥6,490) plans. The World Trip BBQ Premium Plan offers a taste of all the cuisines in one course, for ¥7,590.

The all-American course comes with classic beef short ribs, pork, jerk chicken and sausage, accompanied with condiments like buffalo sauce, magic mustard and Kansas City barbecue sauce. The Korean course, on the other hand, features a one-centimetre-thick slab of samgyeopsal (pork belly), beef short rib, scallops, kimchi and four kinds of dips including dadaegi miso and yangnyeom (sweet and spicy) sauce. The Mexican course comes with beef, jerk chicken, pork, as well as seafood options like scallops, salmon and shrimp, and a side of guacamole. All courses come with 90 minutes of all-you-can-drink beverages from a list of 160 cocktails and soft drinks.

Popular German craft beer brand Schmatz takes over the Lumine Ikebukuro rooftop with its annual beer garden serving modern German cuisine. It features four original craft beers, plus a range of beer cocktails including shandy gaff, cassis beer, mango beer and even a banana weizen. Additionally, there are regular cocktails, highballs, shochu and wines to choose from as well. 

The standard barbecue plan (¥6,000) includes sauerkraut, camembert cheese ahijo with baguette, sausages, beef, pork, and an array of veggies to grill. You can order drinks as you go, but we recommend adding an additional ¥500 to get an all-you-can-drink deal on its four speciality beers on tap.

Step into an enchanted digital forest in this collaborative exhibition between teamLab and Galaxy. Now in its third iteration, the interactive experience is based on the concept of catching different digital creatures to study them before releasing them back into their habitat. As it's a digital art experience, you'll be using an app on the Galaxy smartphone to collect different prehistoric animals in the mystical forest.

Be gentle when approaching these critters! If you try to touch them they might run and disappear into the forest. If you're lucky, they might become curious instead and turn towards you. Nevertheless, the exercise here is to point your phone camera at them, release a Study Arrow in their direction, and capture them onto your screen so that you can learn more about their nature.

You can also work together with other visitors and shepherd the dinosaurs projected on the floor. This allows you to then deploy the Study Net and capture them into your phone. Once you've done studying them, you can release them back into the space.

While the exhibit is free, reservations are required so as to avoid overcrowding the venue. Each session is an hour long, with the exhibition open from 11am until 7pm daily. You can book a timeslot as early as three days in advance via the event website.

Craft, creativity, heritage and modernity all converge in this immersive visual journey through the 187-year history of American jewellery maestros Tiffany. Within the gallery space of Tokyo Node, situated in the soaring Toranomon Hills Station Tower complex, ten rooms are filled with hundreds of captivating creations that range from one-of-a-kind items to iconic accessories that has become part of popular culture.

One standout amongst many is the very first iteration of Tiffany’s emblematic ‘Bird on a Rock’ brooch. This was conceived by longstanding Tiffany designer Jean Schlumberger, whose work for the brand won over clients including actresses Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo. As with many of Schlumberger’s works, this magnificent nature-themed piece reminds us that, for all of their luxury and glamour, diamonds are ultimately something derived from the earth itself.

The exhibition also explores Tiffany’s relationship with Japan, which stretches back to the company’s earliest days. Many designers closely associated with Tiffany, including Elsa Peretti and Edward Chandler Moore, took inspiration from traditional Japanese arts, making ‘Tiffany Wonder’ a spiritual homecoming for some of the featured works.

Tickets are available online.

The exhibition is closed on the following dates: April 17 (5pm-8pm), April 22 (6.30pm-8pm), April 30 (5pm-8pm), May 8 (11.30am-1pm, 5pm-8pm), May 13 (6pm-8pm), May 16 (6pm-8pm).

Yokohama’s premier celebration of the arts takes place every three years. Themed ‘Wild Grass: Our Lives’, the 2024 edition will centre on the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Former Daiichi Bank Yokohama Branch, and BankART Kaiko, as well as a wide variety of venues around the city, welcoming an international lineup of 93 artists – 20 of whom will be exhibiting all-new works.

Tickets are available here or via our affiliate partner Klook.

Renowned 20th-century master Henri Matisse (1869-1954), though best known as a painter, was a true multimedia artist whose creativity also spanned sculpture, printmaking and other forms. This is the very first exhibition in Japan to focus on the French artist’s work with paper cut-outs, the medium he energetically pursued in the last decade-and-a-half of his life.

Works on loan from the Matisse Museum in Nice, France show how the artist began creating expressionistic collages composed of scissor-cut pieces of paper in a multitude of colours. The subjects and themes of these cutout works included the female form, avian life, and a distinctive two-dimensional take on the flowers-and-fruit still life. While initially modest in size, these cut-outs grew in scale to become murals spanning entire walls: the largest example featured here is some eight metres wide.

Also on show is a selection of works in other media, including painting, ink brush on paper, and stained glass.

This exhibition is closed on Tuesday, except April 30.

Text by Darren Gore

The Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, established in 2018, is a prize intended to encourage mid-career artists to make further breakthroughs in their work by providing winners with several years of continuous support. Here, the two winners of the award’s fourth edition each present shows that, despite their creative diversity, both involve visitors and their actions becoming key elements of the art. Through this, both shows lead audiences to examine their relationships: with fellow humans, animals, and society’s expectations.

Saeborg, born in 1981 and based in Tokyo, creates and performs as a latex bodysuit-clad ‘imperfect cyborg, half human and half toy’ that enables the female behind this guise to transcend such characteristics as age and gender. Here Saeborg presents ‘I Was Made for Loving You’, for which a section of the venue has been transformed into a life-sized toy farm. Visitors will experience a highly immersive installation-performance that transcends the boundaries between the body and synthetic materials, and between human and animal.

Michiko Tsuda (born in 1980 and working in Ishikawa prefecture) presents ‘Life is Delaying’, an installation that uses video to explore the notion of physicality. The work recreates the private world experienced by a family at home through the perspective of someone operating an old-school video camera. The piece was inspired by Tsuda’s childhood memory of a video camera appearing in her family residence. Here, fictitious documentation of a family, the smallest basic unit of society, is expanded upon to examine the positions of individuals within larger groups and systems.

The exhibition is closed on Monday (except April 29 and May 6), April 30 and May 7.

Opened in 2016 in Munich, the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) holds one of Europe’s foremost collections of urban-inspired contemporary art, encompassing the likes of Kaws, Banksy and Shepherd Fairey. Now Tokyo, a key city in global street culture, finally gets a taste of the MUCA collection with the arrival of this touring exhibition that has already wowed Kyoto and Oita City.

Over 60 major pieces, including career-defining work by the above-mentioned figures as well as fellow legends including JR, Invader and Barry McGee, are being shown in Japan for the very first time. Highlights include Banksy’s ‘Bullet Hole Bust’, in which the artist’s anti-establishment attitude is rendered in 3D form: the cultural bust form associated with classical art is brutalised by a bullet to the forehead. Kaws’s ‘4ft Companion (Dissected Brown)’, meanwhile, cuts away the left-side ‘skin’ of one his signature ‘Companion’ characters to reveal its inner organs.

Text by Darren Gore

An art gallery operated by luxury house Hermès and located within the brand’s Ginza flagship store, Le Forum presents the second exhibition of a two-part series exploring the practice of ecology in art. ‘Ephemeral Anchoring’ brings together diverse work from four international creators to examine contemporary art's potential to be a site for dialogue between nature and human energy.

Photographs by Nicolas Flocq, shot during dives into oceans and rivers across the globe, use both conceptual and scientific methods to capture 'underwater landscapes' together with their ecosystems. As the representative work included here demonstrates, the results of Flocq’s shots range from documentary of subaquatic human activity normally hidden from view, to abstract images formed from the green and blue tones of the sea. Texas-based Kate Newby, meanwhile, contributes colourful abstract installations that appear to proliferate across the gallery space.

Japan’s Takeshi Yasura presents installations themed on various natural and sensory phenomena ('noise', 'cosmos') that are partly the result of the artist’s daily practice of literal 'field work': sowing seeds, ploughing and replanting. Finally, French sculptor Raphaël Zarka presents a series of photographs in which the latent dynamism of public artworks is revealed by skateboarders riding their geometric forms.

The exhibition is closed on March 27 and April 3.

Text by Darren Gore

British-born artist Mark Leckey is a product of the UK’s ever-vibrant pop culture, and through diverse mediums he confronts youth, dance music, nostalgia, social class and history from an often countercultural perspective. The subcultural edge of his work – which encompasses film, sound, sculpture, performance, collage and more – additionally takes on a gritty incongruousness when enjoyed at Louis Vuitton’s sleek Omotesando exhibition space.

The French luxury house here presents two Leckey works from its collection. 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore feat. Big Red Soundsystem' (1999-2003-2010) is a film that, through a mash-up of archive footage, vividly traces the development of the UK’s underground dance music scene from 1970s disco through to the ’90s rave scene.

2013’s 'Felix the Cat', meanwhile, is a giant inflatable rendering of the cartoon cat that Leckey considers a pioneer of the digital age. Almost a century ago, this feline character was one of the first subjects to be transmitted as a TV signal.

Text by Darren Gore

One of the most influential figures in twentieth-century sculpture finally gets a comprehensive career retrospective in Japan. Romanian-born Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) is considered one of the pioneers of modernist sculpture, thanks to his bold exploration of pure form. Around 90 exhibits, including 2D works such as fresco, tempera and drawings as well as sculptures, demonstrate how his muse flourished after a period working as assistant to Auguste Rodin.

Brancusi’s artistic practice came to combine wild shapes influenced by non-Western art forms, such as African sculpture, with an acute sense of the materials he was working with. In earlier, plaster sculptures such as ‘The Kiss’ (1907-10), human and animal figures are abstracted yet still clearly identifiable. By the late 1920s however, as illustrated by the bronze-cast ‘Bird in Space’ (1926), Brancusi’s subjects are rendered as abstract silhouettes almost entirely distinct from their natural form.

This retrospective includes over 20 sculptures on loan from the Brancusi Estate, as well as works from other collections both Japanese and international.

The exhibition is closed on Mondays (except April 29, May 6), April 30 and May 7.

This debut Japanese solo show from Chicago-born Theaster Gates takes place at one of Tokyo’s most prestigious art venues. Gates’s rise to prominence is very much part of the art world’s increasing recognition of the voices of African-American and other non-white communities. A truly multi-disciplinary creative – focused primarily on sculpture and ceramics but also working in architecture, music, performance, fashion and design – Gates strives to preserve and promote Black culture via projects as large as a Chicago initiative that has transformed over 40 abandoned buildings into public art spaces.

Also key to Gates’s vision, and a central theme of this show, is the influence that Japanese cultural and craft traditions have had on the artist over the past two decades. From initially travelling to Japan in 2004 to study ceramics, encounters and explorations over the subsequent decades have led Gates to formulate 'Afro-Mingei'. This is a creative ideology inspired by Gates’s identification of a spirit of resistance shared by Afro-American culture and Japan’s Mingei folk crafts movement. It imagines Black aesthetics and Japanese craft philosophies coming together in our globalised era to form a future hybrid culture.

This exhibition explores the Afro-Mingei concept through installations including a revolving, mirror-surfaced 'iceberg' that pays homage to Chicago house music, and an endlessly reverberating church organ. There are also works utilising materials as disparate as Japanese incense and firefighters’ hoses, ceramics and sculptures from both Gates and fellow US and Japanese artists, and much more.

The exhibition closes early at 5pm on Tuesday (except August 13).

Animal life is not something commonly associated with Tokyo – a city that, arguably more than any other world capital, is built for human convenience. Nonetheless, as this exhibition vividly demonstrates, the relationship between Tokyoites and animals has run deep ever since the city’s establishment as Edo over four centuries ago.

Around 240 exhibits, on loan from the vast collection of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, explore this human-beast connection from the establishment of the Edo Shogunate in 1603 through to more recent times. This show is an expanded ‘homecoming’ edition of ‘Un Bestiare Japonais’, a highly acclaimed event held at Paris’ Maison de la culture du Japon in 2022 and 2023.

Tokyo’s love of cats and dogs, still highly evident today, is seen here in pieces ranging from ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the masters of that genre, to the often cute motifs used in both traditional crafts and more modern toys and ornaments. A print by the legendary Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858; shown in the exhibition’s second half) features a plump domestic cat as it gazes from a window, with Mt Fuji on the distant horizon. Less lovable creatures are referenced too, as in Harunobu Suzuki’s (1724-1770; exhibition’s second half) depiction of a mother and her child hanging up a mosquito net.

Edo and Tokyo history is illuminated through this diverse selection of exhibits. Pre-mass industrialisation, the city relied heavily upon the ‘labour’ of horses, and a section unique to this Tokyo edition features works, including nishiki-e paintings, depicting the horse-drawn carriages that ran on the streets from 1882 until 1903 as a form of public transportation.

Note: Content varies across the exhibition’s first (April 27-May 26) and second (May 28-June 23) terms. The exhibition is closed on Monday (or Tuesday if Monday is a public holiday).