November 2024 events in Tokyo

If you’re looking for the most OTT illumination in Tokyo, this is it. Yomiuri Land's annual winter light show will bedazzle even the most jaded illumination-fiend. As the name suggests, jewels are the focus here: literally millions of colourful LEDs are set up throughout the vast theme park evoking sparkling gems. The park is split into ten areas where you will be treated to beautifully lit attractions. 

In addition to the rainbow-lit, 180-metre-long Celebration Promenade and Crystal Passage, you’ll spot two gigantic sparkly Ferris wheels to mark the amusement park's 60th anniversary. The highlight, however, is the fountain show, with water illuminated in different colours and sprayed into the air to create stunning shapes. There are three kinds of show happening every 15 minutes from 5pm daily. Also look out for the fountain’s flames and lasers, which are synchronised to music.

Among the illustrated characters that emerged in Japan across the second half of the 20th century, and continue to capture hearts both at home and across the globe, none represents the phenomenon better than Hello Kitty. With a half-century now having passed since the cartoon feline was introduced by the Sanrio company, this major exhibition looks at how Kitty-chan’s design has evolved over decades of cultural change: without ever losing that innate charm that has endeared her to generation after generation.

The largest collection of Hello Kitty goods ever amassed in one place, as well as video content and other media, gradually reveals the secrets to this character’s appeal: how besides keeping pace with the times while simultaneously transcending them, Hello Kitty can mirror the day-to-day moods of each and every fan. Highlights include collaboration pieces created with well-known artists and designers, and a series of immersive photo spots featuring not only Kitty-chan but also other faces from the Sanrio stable, including My Melody and Cinnamoroll.

In teamLab's new pop-up exhibition in collaboration with the Galaxy store in Harajuku, the digital art collective's enchanted forest has been transformed into an underwater fantasy. This latest installation is also an interactive one, where visitors can use smartphones to catch, study and release the colourful sea creatures they encounter in the space. There's a great variety of marine animals to see, including fish like tuna as well as aquatic creatures that are endangered or extinct. 

To catch a creature to study it, you can use the designated app on a Galaxy smartphone to scan fish swimming in the space, or throw out a 'Study Net' towards the floor if you see something interesting darting around your feet. 

Each session is an hour-long, with daily exhibitions open from 11am until 7pm. 

Note: an end date for this exhibition has yet to be announced.

What Museum’s latest exhibit, Synesthesia, is an interactive one. This engaging showcase is the work of a Japanese artist who uses air, water and light to craft mesmerising sculptures that blur the lines between perception and reality. 

With a background in sociology and art education, Akihito Okunaka is inspired by late philosopher Bruno Latour to explore the connections between nature and society through our five senses. Here you get to touch, enter and lie down in a balloon-like installation and feel connected with your surroundings.

The 12-metre in diameter balloon sculpture is weighed down by a water 'bed' and bathed in different light frequencies. This multi-sensorial work promises a visual and tactile experience that blurs the lines between sight and touch. Imagine light refracting through multiple layers of translucent plastic film, creating a kaleidoscope of colours that dance across the surface, all while being swayed gently by the water bed.

This exhibition is closed on Mondays (except October 14, November 4, January 13, February 3 and 24) and New Year holidays.

Master painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) is best known for Impressionist works that captured on canvas the ceaseless transitions of nature. As explored by this major exhibition, however, in the later years of his career, this French artist pursued a more abstract approach, with inspiration coming from both personal and wider realities such as bereavement, his own eye disease and the First World War.

The natural world remained Monet’s ostensible subject matter, such as his signature water lily ponds and their surrounding trees and skies, but his depictions of such scenes were then additionally coloured by internal distress.

For this show, around 50 pieces from Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris have been brought over to Japan, with many being shown in the country for the very first time. These are augmented by works held in collections across Japan, to form an expansive look at Monet’s later career.

The highlight here is a large screen of water lilies, which stands over two metres tall and makes for a truly immersive experience.

The exhibition is closed on Mondays (except November 4, January 13, February 10 and February 11) as well as November 5, December 28-January 1, and January 14.

French-born artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) has long loomed large over Roppongi Hills: her outdoor sculpture of a gigantic spider, named ‘Maman’, is a local landmark. The sprawling development’s Mori Art Museum, then, is a fitting venue for this major retrospective of one of the most important artists of the past century. As explored by Bourgeois’ first large-scale Japanese solo exhibition in over 25 years, fear was an ongoing motivation over her seven-decade career.

This fear, however, was not the arachnophobia that one might suppose, given the formidable ‘Maman’. Rather, Bourgeois’ work was driven in part by fear of abandonment; something rooted in her complex and sometimes traumatic childhood. Through her famed oversized sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings and other mediums, she confronted painful personal memories while simultaneously channelling them into work that expresses universal emotions and psychological states.

Across three exhibition ‘chapters’ that each explore a different aspect of family relationships, highlights include the ‘Femme Maison’ series of paintings from the 1940s. These works, which decades later were championed by the feminist movement, each depict a female figure whose top half is obscured by a house which protects yet imprisons her.

Bourgeois’ extensive use of the spider motif, meanwhile, is examined in depth. As hinted at by the landmark ‘Maman’ (the French equivalent of ‘mummy’), for Bourgeois the spider was symbolic of the mother figure who heals wounds just as a spider repairs the threads of its web. The artist's use of this powerful symbol is traced from a small 1947 drawing through to the giant Roppongi arachnid and its 'sister' sculptures located in several cities worldwide.

The exhibition is open until 11pm on September 27 and 28, until 5pm on October 23, and until 10pm on December 24 and 31.

Every year, hordes of Tokyoites make the exodus out of town to classic autumn leaf watching spots like Kamakura, Nikko and Hakone. However, for those with no time to travel, there are plenty of gardens, parks and museums right here in the city to get your koyo fill from mid-to-late November. Here are our top picks of nightly light-ups, historic retreats and lesser-known viewing locations, all in or close to Tokyo. And for particularly energetic foliage-watchers, we recommend these scenic bike routes and these highlight hikes.