Free things to do in Tokyo this week

Bon Odori is a traditional summer dance festival held during Obon, a Buddhist custom to commemorate one's ancestors. This particular festival, one of the biggest in Tokyo, will be held right outside Nakano Station.  Unlike most Bon Odori festivities in Tokyo which take place in the early evening, this Nakano event has an early start at around 10am with a series of music and dance performances. However, the main attraction only begins at 4.40pm, featuring celebrity guests (including the popular super sento idols Junretsu) and DJs playing J-pop tunes. You can expect a good workout dancing to invigorating tracks from spinners including DJ Koo and DJ Celly. But what we are really looking forward to is matching Bon Odori dance steps to classic hits from Bon Jovi, who have endorsed the use of their songs at the festival. Everyone is welcome to join in the Nakano Bon Odori Festival, and it’s free.

Kanda Shrine’s Noryo Matsuri takes place over three days in August. This all-encompassing summer festival features everything from Bon Odori dancing to classic matsuri food, plus a small beer and sake festival that starts a day earlier on August 6. During the Bon Odori session on Friday (4.30pm-8.30pm), you can dance to popular anime songs, while the ones over the weekend (from 5.30pm) feature Kanda Shrine’s original song ‘Kanda Myojin Ondo’. The organisers uploaded a practice video to their YouTube channel, so make sure to learn the steps before heading over. The festival ends at 8.30pm on all three days. The event may be cancelled in the event of bad weather.  Bon Odori Dances will not be held on August 6.  

Around 19 floats and portable shrines are carried around the north side of Hachioji at this summer festival. It is one of the top events of its kind in the Kanto region, held traditionally on the first weekend of August. When rival floats pass one another, their bands attempt to throw each other off their groove in a musical face-off known as buttsuke – a distinctive Hachioji tradition. While the floats and portable shrines appear on Saturday and Sunday, also look out for ice sculptures (Aug 7, 1.30pm-4.10pm), taiko drummers (Aug 8, 3pm-4.30pm), Taiwanese dance performances from Kaohsiung (Aug 7 & 9, 6pm-6.20pm, Aug 8 4.30pm-4.50pm) and more in the course of the three-day fest, which attracted over 800,000 spectators every year before the pandemic. For the festival programme, download the official English pamphlet.

One of Tokyo's biggest annual festivals is celebrating its 75th edition this year. Held at its namesake park, Ueno Summer Festival is a month-long programme packed with a diverse array of traditional events, live performances and seasonal festivities. These include a traditional lantern-floating event on July 17 at 7pm, as well as Japanese taiko drum street performances on July 20 and 25 (from 1pm and 3pm) at Ueno Park’s Shinobazu Pond Bentendo Temple. That said, the festival offers more than just classic Japanese celebrations. The antique market, which will run every day from July 10 to August 11 (from 2pm to 8pm) at the gates of Shinobazu Pond Bentendo Temple, for instance, is a great place to look for small treasures and summer mementoes. For a picture-perfect spot to capture your summer memories, don’t miss the nearby Hasumi Deck lookout, adorned with more than 4,000 wind chimes that create a soothing summer soundtrack. As always, there will be plenty of food and drink stalls encircling Ueno Park's Shinobazu Pond (from 3pm to 9pm daily), selling popular street eats like yakisoba and kakigori shaved ice – a staple summer treat. Check the event website for the full programme (in Japanese only).

Asagaya has been holding its own distinctive Tanabata festival for 70 years now – complete with extravagant kusudama ornaments and a colourful curtain of wind-swept streamers, but the event has moved with the times. In recent years, the papier-mâché decorations dangling from the ceiling of the Pearl Center shopping arcade have included modern characters like Godzilla, Chiikawa, Buzz Lightyear and even Donald Trump. The decorations are there to be seen all day long, but many people wait until dusk to go and enjoy them. That's when the shopping street comes alive with a host of food and drink stalls offering Japanese festive fare.

Nakameguro is celebrating summer with lively Awa Odori and Yosakoi performances over the August 1-2 weekend. The annual festival is bigger than ever, with more than 65 participating teams performing on August 1 and 2, respectively, from 6pm to 8.30pm along the Nakameguro Ginza shopping arcade. Many restaurants and cafés in the area will have stalls set up outside offering takeout food and drinks for you to enjoy while watching the performances. Free soft drinks will be handed out to the first 7,000 visitors on both days.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government No 1 Building in Shinjuku serves as the backdrop for a jaw-dropping and record-breaking projection mapping show. Covering an area of a whopping 13,905sqm, the after-dark spectacle has been certified by Guinness World Records as the largest permanent display of its kind in the world. The nightly showcase features a range of visual wonders created by a mix of local and international artists. Some shows are inspired by Tokyo’s rich history, while others draw on themes like the lunar cycle.  Currently, on weeknights, you can catch striking visuals synchronised to ‘800’ and 'Zankyosanka' by hit Japanese pop singer and lyricist Aimer as well as ‘Pac-Man eats Tokyo’, ‘Lunar Cycle’, ‘Synergy’, ‘Tokyo Resonance’ and ‘Evolution’. On weekends, you can look forward to the aforementioned ‘Zankyosanka (Aimer)’, as well as ‘Godzilla: Attack on Tokyo’ and ‘TYO337’, a display featuring motifs of traditional Japanese performing arts such as Kabuki paired with electronic beats.  From March 20, Pokémon Trading Card Game ‘Tokyo Luminous Night’, a brand-new projection-mapping show featuring Pokémon cards on a massive scale, has been running on weekends and holidays from 6.30pm, 7.30pm and 9pm. Be sure to check the event website for more details. Shows take place every night at fifteen-minute intervals from 6pm (Mar from 6.30pm, 7pm from Apr, 7.30pm from May to Aug) to 9.45pm. For more details and to check the full programme of daily projection mapping shows,...

Dafi Kühne works at the intersection of graphic design, craftsmanship and mechanical performance. At a moment when digital production and AI-generated imagery increasingly dominate visual culture, the Swiss designer has devoted himself to the tactile rigor of letterpress printing, transforming a centuries-old technique into a radically contemporary form of expression. This summer, Ginza Graphic Gallery showcases his distinctive process with ‘Dafi Kühne: Constructing Posters’, on view from July 14 to August 26. Far from nostalgic revivalism, Kühne’s practice pushes analogue printing into unexpected territory. Working from his studio in the Swiss Alps, he operates nearly forty tons of presses, metal type, woodblocks and custom-built tools to produce monumental posters by hand. His works often reach the scale of Swiss street posters, demanding an intense physical engagement with the machinery itself. Combining traditional techniques with self-engineered modifications and digital experimentation, Kühne treats printing not simply as reproduction, but as a performative and sculptural act. The exhibition traces this intricate process from conception to finished object. Alongside completed posters, visitors encounter printing blocks, typographic elements, handmade linocuts and material fragments that reveal the labour embedded within each image. The result is a meditation on the enduring expressive power of the human hand in an increasingly immaterial age, and an immersive...

After collaborating with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure creator Hirohiko Araki in early 2025, Yebisu Beer and Ai Yazawa reunite this summer for a second collaboration. The project centres on new illustrations that reinterpret Yebisu Beer’s historic bijin-ga advertisements – early 20th-century beer posters featuring elegant portraits of women. Yazawa presents two new bijin-ga works reimagined through a contemporary lens and themed around summer evening festivals. The pieces will be exhibited at Yebisu Brewery Tokyo from July 8 to August 31. Visitors can also look forward to limited-edition merchandise featuring her artwork, including T-shirts, notebooks, fans and more.

Born in Kolkata in 1963 and now based in New York, Rina Banerjee has established herself as a singular voice in the global contemporary art scene. Drawing from her experience of migration and diasporic identity, Banerjee creates intricate, richly layered sculptures and installations out of everyday materials like cotton threads, feathers, shells and glass chandeliers. Her practice, informed by both engineering training and fine art education at Yale, navigates the intersections of postcolonial history, feminism and global exchange, often infusing critical perspectives with a subtle, disarming sense of humour. ‘You made me leave home…’ at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is an exhibition of 19 works drawn from the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Organised as part of the foundation’s ‘Hors-les-murs’ programme, which brings major artworks to venues around the world, the exhibition marks both the 20th anniversary of the Espace Louis Vuitton and a decade of the ‘Hors-les-murs’ initiative. Spanning installation, sculpture and painting, the exhibition foregrounds Banerjee’s ongoing exploration of migration, colonial legacies and the circulation of people and objects. At its core is the monumental installation In an unnatural storm… (2008), presented publicly for the first time by the Fondation. Suspended from the ceiling in a cascading constellation of forms, the work evokes both the wonder and instability of global journeys, drawing inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the...