Things to do in Tokyo today

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).

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...

From June 20 to July 20, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum showcases the winning works from one of the world’s most prestigious international photography competitions. Since its launch in 2007, the Sony World Photography Awards has championed photographers at every stage of their careers, providing a global platform for both emerging talent and established practitioners while celebrating the diversity and vitality of contemporary photographic practice. This Tokyo presentation adopts the thematic concept developed for the exhibition’s debut at Somerset House in London. Visitors are invited to engage with the award-winning photographs through three interconnected narratives: Absence, which reflects on memory, loss and erasure; Humans in the Stories, focusing on the immediacy and complexity of lived experience; and Conflicted Territories, examining borders, divisions and the political and social tensions that shape today’s world. By placing the works in dialogue with one another, the exhibition encourages viewers to consider broader global issues through photography’s uniquely evocative visual language. A special highlight is a presentation of works by Joel Meyerowitz, recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award. Widely regarded as one of the pioneers of colour street photography, Meyerowitz has profoundly influenced the evolution of the medium through his luminous explorations of urban life, light and everyday experience. Displayed alongside this...

Hatonomori Hachiman Shrine is celebrating a Bon Odori festival on the evenings of July 17 and 18. You can expect food stalls set up by local businesses in the area, as well as games and activities for children. Plus, of course, the requisite communal dancing. Come at 4pm to learn the choreography, and you can join in one of the Bon Odori dances happening at 5.30pm, 7pm or 7.50pm (5.30pm, 6.45pm and 8pm on Saturday).

Listen to the soft, soothing sounds of wind chimes at Kawasaki Daishi Temple’s annual wind chime market, happening from July 17 to 21. The 31st event this year will feature over 800 types of wind chimes collected from all over the country. The chimes, made of a variety of materials such as ceramics, glass or metal, each produce their own unique sound. While you’re there, don’t forget to purchase the temple’s very own version – the ‘Daruma wind chime for warding off evil’ – which promises to do just that.

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...

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.

Step into a world of vibrant chrysanthemums this spring at this free collaborative exhibition between teamLab and Galaxy. Now in its fifth year, the interactive, immersive space at Galaxy Harajuku uses cutting-edge projection mapping to depict flowers caught in an endless cycle of birth and death. Reach out to touch them and they’ll wither; stand still beside them and they’ll bloom more quickly. Look down and you’ll see flowing currents of gold beneath your feet – traces shaped by your very presence. The movements of others create their own currents, which intertwine and form swirling vortices. The result is a constantly shifting environment where no two moments are ever the same. The Galaxy store also invites visitors to capture these fleeting scenes using the foldable smartphones available at the venue.

Daniel Buren has spent more than six decades questioning where an artwork begins and where the surrounding world enters into it. Internationally renowned for his unmistakable 8.7cm vertical stripes, the French artist has transformed this seemingly neutral motif into a rigorous conceptual tool, using it to expose the architectural, historical and symbolic conditions of every site he inhabits. This spring and summer, Scai Piramide in Roppongi presents ‘Situated Works 1966-2013’, a rare survey spanning nearly fifty years of his practice. The exhibition traces Buren’s evolution from his early, radical interventions of the 1960s to luminous optical-fiber works produced in the 2010s. Historical pieces such as Peinture aux formes variables reveal the moment when the striped industrial fabric first became his defining visual language, while the Five Elements paintings, originally created for a 1989 exhibition in Nagoya, demonstrate his persistent dismantling of expressive authorship and painterly convention. In later galleries, Buren expands this inquiry through works integrating LED-lit optical fibers, where colour and light become spatial phenomena rather than fixed surfaces. Their shimmering presence underscores the artist’s long-held conviction that colour is the irreducible core of visual experience. Deeply connected to Japan, Buren here appears as an artist whose disciplined investigations continue to sharpen our perception of space itself.