The best things to do in Tokyo this weekend

Yuri Horie has always captured the Tokyo you feel more than see – the soft neon, the nostalgia, and the beauty and weirdness of everyday life here in Japan. Her new photobook 浪漫 (Romance) vol.3 -日常 (Everyday)- peels that world open, focusing on people chasing romance in the quiet cracks of daily life.

In earlier volumes, Yuri explored ‘romance’ as a concept; now she turns to how it lives in the mundane. She photographs decotora trucks, festival rituals, tattoos, nightlife and street fashion – not as spectacle, but as lifelines to feeling. In vol.3, she stitches these threads across landscapes and faces, turning what’s usually unseen into what stays with you.

The pop-up will showcase the new photobook, where she traces how nostalgia and rebellion still course through Japan’s streets in quiet, ordinary moments. Alongside the book release will be limited-edition goods that will allow you to take home a slice of romance. 

One of Japan’s largest urban photography festivals has returned to Tokyo. Now in its seventh year, it runs until October 27 across multiple venues in Yaesu, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi and Ginza.

This year’s edition features prints by photographic legend Stephen Shore at Tokyo Midtown Yaesu, as well as photographs by internationally acclaimed contemporary photographers Melissa Schriek and Stephen Gill as public artworks. On weekdays, be sure to visit “Visions of Japanese Women Photographers Seen in Photobooks” from I’m So Happy You Are Here (2024), a retrospective on the history of Japanese women photographers through photo books that include works by Mayumi Suzuki, among many others.

Be sure to download the official festival map before heading out. Some exhibits are closed on weekends. More information can be found on the official website.

It's not difficult to guess how Enoshima's landmark tower got its name. With its white facade and cylindrical structure, the Sea Candle observation tower – located only a short hop away from Kamakura – is a fantastic place to catch a 360-degree view of Enoshima's coast and surrounding seaside towns. This autumn, however, the towering torch won't be the island's only candle.

From October 11 to November 3, roughly 10,000 wax candles will be placed along Enoshima Sunset Terrace and lit up to illuminate the promenade leading to the tower. Weather permitting, the candles will be there every evening from 5pm, though an announcement will be posted at around 12noon on the venue website if the illumination has to be cancelled.

The Tokyo Biennale returns with an invitation to explore the city through the theme ‘Wander for Wonder’. From October 17 to December 14, the international art festival transforms the capital into a living gallery, bringing together 38 artist groups from seven countries in a city-wide celebration of walking, discovery and creativity.

Taking place across two main venues – Ueno’s 400-year-old Kan’eiji Temple and the Etoile Kaito Living Building – alongside six exhibition areas including Ueno, Kanda, Nihonbashi and Marunouchi, the Biennale blends contemporary art with Tokyo’s deep cultural layers. Installations emerge at temples, across public spaces, in shops and vacant properties, creating a unique urban tapestry of expression and memory.

Curated to be a ‘social dive’, the Biennale encourages visitors to encounter art through movement, echoing the artistic legacies of walking-based practices by figures such as Yoko Ono and Gabriel Orozco. As people stroll through neighbourhoods and engage with their surroundings, each step becomes part of a creative process.

Tokyo Biennale 2025 looks set to be a journey of serendipitous encounters, offering a fresh lens on the city’s untold stories and its vibrant potential for connection through art.

Many of the exhibitions and events at the Tokyo Biennale are free. However, select exhibitions charge entrance fees. For those seeking a comprehensive experience, all-access passes are available for ¥3,000 per adult (or ¥2,500 if purchased in advance) and ¥1,800 for students (advance passes ¥1,500). These passes grant unlimited access to all venues during the festival period.

For a detailed program and more information, visit the Tokyo Biennale’s website.

This annual event might just be the best time to explore Tokyo’s vibrant cocktail scene. This year, Tokyo Cocktail 7Days is running from October 16 to 26 and 110 bars are set to participate. With a special cocktail passport, you can bar-hop around Tokyo’s world-renowned bars such as Bar BenFiddich and The SG Tavern, and enjoy special cocktails created by talented bartenders at a set price of ¥1,300 per drink. While this special price is limited to selected drinks that are created specifically for this occasion, you can use the ¥1,300 coupon that comes with the aforementioned passport to redeem for any drink at a participating bar.

In addition to bar-hopping, the passport also gives you access to the Village, at Ride Tennozu on October 18 and 19. This pop-up space will feature eight popular bars from around Tokyo, and the passport will get you free drink tastings at the venue. You can also attend seminars and workshops to listen to acclaimed bartenders and learn about the art of making cocktails.

Whether you are a cocktail aficionado or just starting to dip your feet into Tokyo’s bar culture, this is a good deal to help you get immersed in Tokyo’s world-class drinking scene.

Tickets can be purchased online through the event website.

Taking place every other weekend at the renovated Shibuya Municipal Kitaya Park, this outdoor vintage market is the place to pick up everything from American Levi's and handmade knit sweaters to unique artisanal accessories. Boasting approximately 20-30 booths, the market offers a curated selection of shops selling on-trend vintage outfits and trinkets from local artists, making it an exciting day out for fashion fiends.

Dates are subject to change. Check the event Instagram for more details.

Everyone loves Chiikawa right now. Get your fill of the mischievous characters created by Japanese illustrator Nagano in Shibuya, where the franchise’s official ramen shop returns for a limited time. Located on the basement floor of Shibuya Parco, it deals in ramen of the pork variety, hence the buta (pig) in the name. The ramen is served in three sizes: Chiikawa (mini), Hachiware (small) and Usagi (large). Each bowl will come with a novelty sticker, featuring either Chiikawa, Hachiware or Usagi depending on the bowl you ordered.

As for drinks, the Shisa Mandarin Soda is a must-try, named after the hard-working lion dog and ramen shop assistant in the Chiikawa universe. Each drink comes with a novelty character card, which you can draw at random from a selection of 10 characters.

Visitors who grab a bite of the ramen are also allowed exclusive access to the adjacent merch shop, complete with limited-edition goods – think T-shirts, ramen bowls, beer jugs and towels featuring the adorable Chiikawa.

Tachikawa's Showa Kinen Park has the most impressive fields of cosmos flowers in Tokyo and this is the ideal time to see them all in full bloom. The hilly grasslands of the park are usually draped in colour from mid-September with various types of cosmos flowers, and the multicoloured scenery can be enjoyed well into mid-October.

There are three main gardens: The Lemon Bright field, which is covered in vivid yellow sulfur cosmos; Autumn Bouquet Garden, which has a mixture of 20 different cosmos; and the Cosmos Sensation filled with lilac blooms.

Don't miss the picturesque soap bubble event, where you can see countless small bubbles floating over the flower gardens. This special spectacle happens twice a day from 10.30am and 12noon on September 13 at the Lemon Bright field, September 28 at the Autumn Bouquet Garden, and October 4 at the Cosmos Sensation flower garden.

Entrance fees are waived on October 5 and 19, 2025.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo celebrates its 30th birthday by gathering together over 30 artists and collectives from diverse generations and geographies to reflect on how contemporary art can illuminate the hidden structures of daily life while opening new possibilities for collective imagination.

Foregrounding domestic, institutional and urban contexts from households shaped by gender norms to the contested spaces of Okinawa and Mumbai, ‘Choreographies of Everyday’ investigates how subjectivity is formed, constrained and transformed. Newly commissioned works developed through research in Tokyo will join pieces by artists including Satoru Aoyama, Jonathas de Andrade, Mako Idemitsu, Shilpa Gupta and the Rice Brewing Sisters Club. Together, these works confront systemic violence and oppression while highlighting acts of resistance, creativity and humour that endure in the everyday.

The exhibition’s title signals both mechanisms of social control and the agency to subvert or transcend them. In that spirit, the show unfolds as a dynamic platform, enriched by performances, talks and workshops throughout its duration.

Daido Moriyama has spent over six decades redefining the possibilities of photography. Born in 1938, he emerged in the 1960s with raw, high-contrast images that challenged conventional aesthetics and captured the restless energy of post-war Japan. His international recognition, as seen in exhibitions from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to London’s Tate Modern, established the Osaka native as a global icon. Honoured with the Hasselblad Award in 2019, Moriyama continues to shape the visual language of photography with unmatched vitality.

Until October 27, GR Space Tokyo presents ‘Daido Moriyama: In Tokyo’, an exhibition marking the Harajuku venue’s first anniversary. Divided into two phases and featuring around 60 new works shot with the Ricoh GR series, the display captures the shifting landscapes and fleeting human presences of the city in 2025.

Free to enter, the exhibition invites visitors to experience the immediacy and intensity of a metropolis in constant flux, distilled through the lens of one of Japan’s greatest living photographers.

Creator of the iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa – and more than 30,000 other works across a remarkable 90-year life – Katsushika Hokusai was known for his restless spirit (he moved 93 times) and ever-evolving identity (he used more than 30 artist names). And by the way, the ukiyo-e impresario’s prolific genius also laid the foundation for what we now recognise as manga and anime.

This autumn, ‘Hokusai’ at Creative Museum Tokyo offers an immersive journey into the artist’s seemingly boundless world. With over 300 pieces on display, including the complete Hokusai Manga (from the world-famous Uragami Collection), all three volumes of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, and a set of 16 newly discovered hand-painted works from his final years, the show promises unprecedented depth.

And as we’ve come to expect from this venue, the artworks on display will be accompanied by some certifiably contemporary exhibits. These include animated adaptations of Hokusai prints by top Japanese animators, highlighting how the visual storytelling of Edo’s greatest artist continues to resonate. Be sure to exit through the gift shop for a look at some 150 pieces of exclusive merch, including collaborations with Peanuts, Chums and Swiss Army knife maker Victorinox.

Marking 100 years since the dawn of the Showa era and 80 years since the end of World War II, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo looks back with ‘Opening Documents, Weaving Memories’, an exhibition that reflects on Japan’s turbulent mid-20th century. With 280 works on view, the display explores how art has served both as a record of history and as a medium for reconstructing memory across generations.

Spanning the 1930s to the 1970s, the exhibition unfolds across eight sections that probe the role of painting, photography and film during wartime and its aftermath. Visitors encounter powerful ‘War Record Paintings’, commissioned by the Imperial Japanese army and navy to document battles, alongside intimate portrayals of life on the home front. Works such as Ai-Mitsu’s Self-Portrait (1944) and Ken’Ichi Nakamura’s Kota Bharu (1942) highlight the complex intersections of personal expression and state narrative. Later sections trace the shifting visual language of memory, from depictions of wounded bodies in the 1950s to dialogues prompted by Vietnam War imagery in the 1970s.

By juxtaposing propaganda, personal visions and post-war reinterpretations, the exhibition invites audiences to consider how museums can act as repositories of collective memory. In doing so, it opens documents of the past while weaving them into living dialogues with the present and future.

In the news for his role as the designer of the Expo 2025 site, Sou Fujimoto is an architect whose work explores the relationship between nature and architecture. Born in Hokkaido, he is inspired by the natural landscapes of his childhood and seeks to integrate organic forms into the built environment through an approach he calls ‘primitive future’.

This philosophy translates into an exploration of the limits between indoors and outdoors and the natural and the artificial, creating spaces that invite a new experience of inhabiting it. Fujimoto’s residential projects in Japan, such as House N, House O and House T, as well as international projects such as the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, illustrate this desire to blur spatial boundaries. His work is characterised by the use of simple materials, often only one per project, implemented in innovative ways to create complex and intriguing shapes. The balance between a defined program and the freedom of appropriation by the occupants is at the heart of his approach.

Fujimoto’s first major Tokyo retrospective takes over the Mori Art Museum from July 2 to November 9. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the architect’s journey over the past quarter century, showcasing his achievements. Models, plans and documentary photographs sit alongside life-size models and installations, providing an immersive visual and spatial experience of the essence of his work. The exhibition highlights projects such as the Musashino Art University Museum & Library, the Arbre Blanc in Montpellier, France, the House of Music in Budapest, and – yes – the Expo site on Osaka’s Yumeshima.

Kanagawa-born, NYC-based Aki Sasamoto’s decompartmentalised artistic practice explores performance, sculpture, dance, and any other medium conducive to the expression of her ideas. At the intersection of visual and performing arts, her work involves collaborating with musicians, choreographers, scientists and academics, and she often takes on multiple roles: performer and sculptor, but also professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Sculpture at Yale University.

In her work, Sasamoto constantly reflects on the design and configuration of sculptures and devices that she uses as scores during improvised performances within immersive installations. As she describes it, her creative process is akin to fishing: she ‘casts a net and waits for a perfect alignment of events’, letting several elements float before grasping the connections by relating them to seemingly foreign references.

On from August 23 to November 24, ‘Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo explores the interplay between sculptural creation and performance that has characterised the artist’s work for two decades. From landmark early works to more recent creations that emphasise kinetic elements, the exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Sasamoto’s journey and unique approach, where the boundaries between artistic disciplines blur in favour of captivating hybrid expression.

Few artists have touched the soul of modern art as profoundly as Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). In a mere decade, the Dutchman produced an astonishing body of work, including vivid landscapes, tormented portraits and expressive still lifes, that continues to resonate deeply with audiences worldwide.

Yet Van Gogh’s posthumous fame owes much to those closest to him: his brother Theo, Theo’s wife Johanna, and their son Vincent Willem. Together, they ensured that the painter’s vision and legacy would endure for generations.

The first exhibition in Japan to focus on the Van Gogh family and their collection, ‘Van Gogh’s Home’ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum features over 30 of its protagonist’s works, from early drawings to late masterpieces, as well as four letters shown on these shores for the first time. The display traces the journey of the collection from the artist’s death to the present day, with highlights including immersive digital experiences and rarely seen works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries.