The best things to do in Tokyo this weekend

Tokyo’s popular Vietnam Festival focuses on showcasing the best of contemporary Vietnamese culture. Around 100 stalls are lined up at Yoyogi Park with ample quantities of bánh mì, phở and bánh xèo, which are best paired with Vietnamese beer and coffee. There are also plenty of colourful handicrafts, knick-knacks, apparel and condiments, too.

Don’t miss the live entertainment at the main stage, ranging from traditional performing arts to pop music. This year features major Vietnamese artists Phuong Ly and rock band Buc Tuong. You can also catch performances from Japanese acts such as singer-songwriter Ai Kawashima and the band Sunplaza Nakano-kun and Pappara Kawai. The full line-up and schedule is on the website.

This Hawaiian event is taking over Yebisu Garden Place in Ebisu for three days of hula and Tahitian dancing, chill ukulele music and delicious island food. Look out for Hawaiian delicacies like garlic shrimp, spam musubi, loco moco and masala doughnuts. You can also browse the dozens of stalls selling Hawaiian jewellery, swimwear, cosmetics, clothing and much more.

To mark the second anniversary of Shimokita Senrogai, Shimokitazawa is hosting a celebration with live performances, markets, food trucks and more over the weekend. This entertainment complex, opened in 2022, was built atop an old railway track that stretches 1.7km between Higashi-Kitazawa and Setagaya-Daita stations.

Starting from Shimokitazawa Station’s east exit, the plaza right outside the ticket gate will have police cars, buses and fire trucks on display for children to explore up close and take photos. The bus will pull double duty as a venue for a photo exhibition and live performances.

Walk a little further north towards the Shimokita Senrogai Open Space and you’ll come to one of the festival’s main sites. On Saturday June 1 (12noon-6pm), the outdoor space lends itself to a large flea market with pre-loved clothes and items from various thrift stores in Shimokitazawa. On Sunday June 2 (11am-8pm) you’ll find a food and architecture festival instead, where you can grab a bite from one of the food trucks on-site and listen to talks by various architects. 

Walk further towards Higashi-Kitazawa Station and you’ll come to Reload’s third anniversary celebration. Make sure you check out the special hand-lettering workshop by Tokyo-based design studio Letterboy. 

In Nansei Plus just outside Shimokitazawa Station’s southwest exit, there’s an amplified version of the shopping complex’s monthly organic food market. 

Walk further south towards Setagaya-Daita Station and there’s a craft beer fest showcasing local Tokyo breweries such as Vertere, Inkhorn Brewing, Novel Craft Brewing and more. Setagaya-Daita Station will also have a farmers market from 10am to 4pm on both days, as well as a free mochi-tsuki (rice cake pounding) event at 11.30am on Sunday. Make sure to get a numbered ticket – distribution starts at 10.30am and only 300 people will be treated to a serving of freshly made mochi. 

Continuing with the recent trend of dazzling nighttime projection mapping events, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and digital creative company Hitohata are putting on a similar showcase along the Edo Castle moat between Ichigaya and Iidabashi stations from May 30 to June 2.

Set to begin at 7.30pm, the projection mapping display will feature a variety of ukiyo-e motifs along the 100m-long moat wall until 9pm. Highlights include woodblock print-inspired animation of cherry blossoms and koi fish; the latter is a nod to the metropolitan government’s ongoing efforts to clean up and revitalise the moat.

We recommend catching the projection mapping show from Sotobori Park near Hosei University for the best unobstructed views.

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.

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

Yokohama is commemorating its port city heritage with an annual weekend festival filled with street dance parties, fireworks and family-friendly activities. All the events leading up to the fireworks display on June 2 serve to showcase and celebrate Yokohama’s 165-year-old legacy as Japan’s first port that opened to the West. 

Get your yukata ready this June 1-2 weekend, as the Japan Bon Dance Association is hosting multiple Bon-odori dance gatherings on both days at Pacifico Yokohama's Plaza Hiroba. We recommend joining the locals for a spot of street dancing at 5pm on Saturday. This particular session will be playing the classic ‘YMCA’ by the Village People as the opening song. There are several Bon-odori folk dancing events throughout the weekend (Saturday at 4pm, 5pm and 7pm, Sunday at 4pm and 5pm) and they are all free.

At the nearby Rinko Park, kids will have a field day with the multiple play sites and attractions including inflatable pools, trampolines and cute ponies. The main highlight of the festival is, of course, the fireworks on Sunday at 7.30pm. Be sure to not miss the impressive audiovisual spectacle combining lights, music and pyrotechnics.

Star Island, a cutting-edge entertainment concept that reimagines the traditional fireworks display for the 21st century, returns to its native Japan for the first time in five years. An immersive multi-sensory experience, conjured up by fireworks, lasers, live performances, 3D sound and more, is set to captivate crowds at Tokyo’s Odaiba Marine Park on two weekend evenings (Saturday June 1 and Sunday June 2). Ahead of that, Fukuoka’s PayPay Dome hosts the show in May (Saturday May 11 and Sunday May 12).

Since its debut in 2017, also in Odaiba, Star Island has been wowing audiences at international locations including Singapore and Saudi Arabia. A clutch of diverse Japanese talents, each of them fireworks lovers as well as leaders in their respective fields, collaborated to create a ‘Future Hanabi Entertainment’ spectacle that illuminates the after-dark sky as, from beginning through to finale, synchronised dance and other performances play out on stages below. Fireworks interact with state-of-the-art lasers to stunning effect, augmented at key points by dynamic aerial sculptures formed by drones.

Tickets for these shows are now on sale, with options including group admission.

There’s no admission fee to this craft beer festival, which brings together a large variety of ales, lagers, pilsners and more from over 35 breweries in Japan as well as abroad. When you inevitably decide you want to have a glass, you can get a beer for as low as ¥500.

With over 200 craft brews to choose from, you can compare the different styles of beer and find your favourite pint. To enhance the event’s cool spring vibes, the venue will be decorated with Japanese festive lanterns. There's even covered outdoor seating so that you can enjoy your drink with peace of mind, come rain or shine.

The event will be closed on May 27 and 28.

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

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).

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

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).