October 2024 events and festivals in Tokyo

The Sumi-Yume project, a local initiative promoting art, dance and crafts inspired by the great ukiyo-e artist Hokusai and the Sumida River, is hosting its ninth annual festival from September 1 to December 22. Held across multiple venues along the aforementioned waterway, the festival aims to revitalise the neighbourhoods surrounding the Sumida River through the arts including dance, theatre and film.

You can partake in a new style of Bon Odori dance as portrayed by Hokusai in his ukiyo-e print. This will take place on October 26 from 2pm to 8pm at the Sumida Park Soyokaze Square. During the day, you can also enjoy a variety of stage performances by local artists, such as folk music, DJ mixing, hip-hop and more.

Also, don’t miss the outdoor cinema taking over Lattest Sports on October 11 and the Sumida Park Soyokaze Square on October 12 and 13. While the screening schedule has yet to be announced on the event website, you can expect movies such as ‘Perfect Days’, ‘Sing Street’ and ‘Paddington’.

Sumi-Yume is set to announce many more publicly commissioned works soon. Be sure to check the website for the latest updates.

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.

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.

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.