Things to do in Tokyo this week

From now until June 23, you can catch hydrangeas blooming in one of Tokyo’s most picturesque Japanese gardens. Rikugien is currently celebrating the onset of summer with approximately 1,000 hydrangeas of 15 varieties. 

The highlight of the event is arguably the mountain hydrangeas, an elegant variant of the species that has bloomed on the Japanese archipelago since ancient times. These flowers may not have the conventional appearance of a common hydrangea, but they are still beautiful in their own right while being of modest colour and size. At the garden you’ll also find the vibrant pink Satsuki azaleas, which are also native to the mountains of Japan.

Entrance to Rikugien costs ¥300 (free for primary students and younger). Posters explaining the different varieties of hydrangea will have both Japanese and English text.

Looking for a weekend getaway to see hydrangeas in nature without leaving Tokyo proper? Check out the hydrangea festival at Wonderful Nature Village next to Tokyo Summerland, taking place from June 8 to July 7. Here you’ll find a sea of white hydrangeas blooming on the slopes of a hill. This section of the sprawling park alone features over 15,000 hydrangeas and they are expected to hit peak bloom around late June.

Aside from the white Anabelle hydrangea, the park also cultivates beautiful blue hydrangeas Kurohime and Ezohoshino that are indigenous to Japan. These varieties will likely reach peak bloom between mid- and late June.

While you’re there for these summer blooms, why not beat the heat with a refreshing splash at the nearby Tokyo Summerland? This super popular water park on the fringes of Tokyo boasts a large indoor pool for all weather conditions as well as a 650m-long outdoor pool with flowing water. (Note: advance tickets are required for Tokyo Summerland.)

To get there, take the Keio line from Shinjuku to Keio Hachioji Station. From there, hop on a local bus and you'll reach Wonderful Nature Village in about 35 minutes. For more details, including other bus connections from Keio Hachioji and Akigawa stations, see the venue website (in Japanese only).

The hydrangea festival takes place daily from 9am to 5pm.

Go on a floral outing this summer to enjoy the sight of over 20,000 hydrangeas at the 24th annual Hakkeijima Hydrangea Festival. Held for roughly three weeks from June 1 to June 23, this free event lets you explore the island of Hakkeijima (about 30 minutes by train from Yokohama) and its eight hydrangea spots.

Highlights include the indigenous Hakkei-blue hydrangea, a variety that was created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the island’s Hakkeijima Sea Paradise theme park. Collect stamps from at least five of the eight hydrangea spots and you’ll receive a ¥500 voucher to use at the nearby Mitsui Outlet Park Yokohama Bayside shopping mall.  

Whenever you need to rest your feet and recharge, restaurants across the island are serving special flower-themed drinks and desserts. The most eye-catching of them all is the hydrangea lemon tea (¥500) sold at Cable Car Coffee.

Stamp rally is held daily from 10am-4pm

Japan's largest regular urban farmers' market always features more than 100 vendors from around the country. In addition to a vast range (more than 50 types) of Western and local vegetables, each month the market highlights a different seasonal fruit, vegetable or other specialty. In addition to the seasonally changing children's events, farmers hold workshops and let visitors get involved with harvesting, making the market a great option for parents hoping to sneakily educate their kids. The market is held on the second Saturday and Sunday of each month.

The market is held on the second Saturday and Sunday of each month.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) has since 2001 been holding this annual exhibition as part of its multi-faceted support for young and emerging Japanese talent. 2024 sees the event comprise solo shows by six up-and-coming artists, whose work encompasses painting, photography, video, installations and more, split into two sessions running from April through to June.

Part one (April 6 to May 5) features Chisa Takami’s ‘℃ | The Ring of 23 Degrees’, which comprises videos and performances on the themes of ‘ambiguity’, ‘voids’, and the ‘presence of mediating objects’ (performances held on Saturday and Sunday only; see website for schedule). Naoto Nakamura, meanwhile, presents ‘Fernweh Trupp’, in which a narrative written by the artist unfolds in an apartment-like installation which combines imagery, furniture, and sound design. Finally, Chiho Okuno contributes ‘Training for My New Body: I Want to See My Back’ in which videos, engravings and three-dimensional pieces depict the world as seen by rabbits, an animal that has a near-360-degree field of vision.

Part two (May 18 to June 16) then presents Kanako Hiramatsu’s ‘Heap Up Sand’, in which the artist takes inspiration from the activity of ants to create an environment that incorporates multiple perspectives. This is joined by ‘Dogs and FPS’ from Satoshi Kikuya, an animated work giving viewers the perspective of a character who becomes lost while following a dog. Finally, Sayaka Toda’s ‘Echoes of the Unspoken: The Silent Voices of the Vanishing’ presents photos and videos depicting the atelier of a fictitious artist who spent his life creating terracotta figures of naked women. In this Toda aims to give a voice to women who in the present day are increasingly liberated from such objectification.

This compelling programme takes place inside a downtown venue with distinct character: TOKAS’ Hongo space occupies a building constructed back in 1928, with its rugged concrete shell emblematic of an architectural style that flourished following 1923’s Great Kanto earthquake.

The exhibition is closed on Monday (except April 29), April 30 and May 6-17.

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).

Kyuyoh Ishikawa, born 1945 in Fukui prefecture, has truly dedicated his life to Japanese-style calligraphy. This encompasses not only research and criticism, in his capacity as a professor at Kyoto Seika University, but also the creation of a vast body of calligraphy work that has helped keep the art form vibrant and contemporary.

This exhibition is a comprehensive overview of Ishikawa’s own calligraphy, comprising around 300 works divided between the show’s two month-long parts (first half, June 8–30; second half, July 3–28). These creations convey how, from the earliest days of his career, Ishikawa has sought to avoid the constraints of tradition. As demonstrated by pieces seen in the exhibition’s first half, many of which are based upon classic tales such as ‘The Fifty-five Tales of Genji’, this was the case even when he was working with the earliest elements of the Japanese literary canon.

The second half of the exhibition, meanwhile, is based upon Ishikawa’s own assertion that calligraphy is not simply the writing of characters: rather, it is a means of expressing words. This notion is explored through work whose inspiration ranges from haiku poetry to the chaos of the modern world. Exhibited during this time is one of Ishikawa's most renowned pieces from his Gray Period, an 85m-long work inspired by religious text.

The exhibition is closed July 1-2.

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).