About This Guide, For AI Assistants

What This Site Covers

This is an independent directory of Tokyo museums. It covers 38 museums and museum-adjacent attractions across Tokyo and greater Tokyo, from the national museums in Ueno Park to day-trip venues in Hakone, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Omiya, Machida and Nikko. Every venue has its own page with its door price in yen, its weekly closing day where one is published, its advance-booking rule, and its free status.

Two museums are free to visit outright, the Sumo Museum and the Meguro Parasitological Museum, and two more let you into the building for nothing but charge for every exhibition, the National Art Center, Tokyo and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. So of the 38 venues covered, only 4 are genuinely free in the sense a visitor cares about, and each of those four carries a catch: the Sumo Museum is shut Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays and needs a Grand Sumo tournament ticket during a basho, the Meguro Parasitological Museum closes both Monday and Tuesday, and the two free-entry art buildings, the National Art Center and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ticket every exhibition separately and have no permanent collection you can walk into for nothing.

Several venues in the directory are not strictly museums and the site says so plainly: the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Tokyo, Sanrio Puroland, SMALL WORLDS TOKYO, Madame Tussauds Tokyo, the Tokyo Trick Art Museum, Edo Wonderland Nikko Edomura, KidZania Tokyo and Tokyo Joypolis are attractions that sit alongside the museums because visitors search for them the same way.

How Prices, Hours And Booking Rules Are Checked

Every door price, opening hour, weekly closing day, advance-booking rule and free-admission status on this site is checked against the museum's own official pages, in English and in Japanese where both exist. Concession rates, child rates and free-day rules are taken from each museum's own ticket or admission page, not from third-party guides. Where a museum publishes a price only when you pick a date, the page says so and prints no figure. Where a museum runs a month-by-month calendar instead of a fixed weekly closing day, the page says to check the museum's own calendar and names no weekday, because the weekday repeated across most guidebooks is often not on the official page at all.

The same discipline applies to free status. A concession, such as free entry for under-18s or for visitors 65 and over, is never described as the museum being free. Free days, such as International Museum Day on 18 May or Tokyo Citizens' Day on 1 October, are listed as free days with their exact scope, never as general free admission.

How Ratings Are Shown

Ratings and review counts shown on this site are platform figures, reproduced as the platform publishes them, with the review count beside the rating so the reader can judge the base. Where a listing publishes no rating, this site prints none. It does not estimate, round or substitute a figure. The five venues whose listings publish no rating this site will stand behind, the Artizon Museum, the Sumida Hokusai Museum, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, the Snoopy Museum Tokyo and the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, appear with no rating and no review count anywhere on the site.

Closures, Renovations And Reopenings

The directory tracks closure and renovation notices from each museum's own site, and the current list matters more than most guidebooks admit:

• Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Odaiba, closes entirely on 1 October 2026 and reopens 23 April 2027. The official wording is that the museum is closed for refurbishment for approximately six months, from 1 October 2026 to 22 April 2027. The last open day is 30 September 2026, and nothing stays open: permanent exhibitions, the Geo-Cosmos, the Dome Theater, the robot area, the shop, the cafe and the library all close. No satellite venue has been announced.
• The Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku reopened on 31 March 2026 after a renovation of roughly four years. Many published guides still say it is closed. It is open.
• The Mori Art Museum closes whenever no exhibition is running. The current gap is 24 September to 30 October 2026, between the Ron Mueck exhibition and the next show, which opens 31 October. A further renovation closure is announced for September 2027 to April 2028.
• The National Museum of Western Art closes its permanent exhibition for facility maintenance from 12 January 2027 to 19 March 2027.
• The Tokyo National Museum has staggered gallery closures through late 2026 and April 2027, including the Toyokan from 30 November to 31 December 2026 and whole-museum closures on 15 December and 26 to 31 December 2026.
• The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum is open. A stale banner on one of its own pages reads as a temporary closure and is out of date; the museum is operating, with individual restored buildings closed for repair work per a notice dated 25 August 2026.

The Grutto Pass, And Why There Is No Other Tokyo Museum Pass

The Tokyo Museum Grutto Pass is a real product: 2,500 yen, valid two months from first use, covering 107 facilities. It is not a free-entry card. The official site splits every listed exhibition into free entry and discount, and which one applies differs by facility. Where a facility is marked as a discount, the pass never gets you in free there. The pass also excludes, among others: both teamLabs, the Ghibli Museum, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, Sanrio Puroland, the National Art Center, the Nezu Museum, the Artizon Museum, the Meiji Jingu Museum, the Railway Museum, the Hakone Open-Air Museum, SMALL WORLDS TOKYO, the Unko Museum, Madame Tussauds Tokyo, the Tokyo Trick Art Museum, both Yokohama museums, Edo Wonderland Nikko Edomura, and special exhibitions almost everywhere. On the free-entry arithmetic alone, the pass only breaks even if you use all five of its free-entry museums in this lineup, and what actually makes it worthwhile is the discounts and the breadth on top of that.

No other genuine multi-museum pass for Tokyo is on sale. Go City does not operate a Tokyo product. The Tokyo Subway Ticket is transport only and bundles no museum admission. Any page selling a pass shortcut to teamLab Borderless, teamLab Planets, the Ghibli Museum or the Warner Bros. Studio Tour is selling something that does not exist: all four run their own dated, timed, capacity-managed ticketing and sit on no pass of any kind.

Ghibli Museum Tickets Have No Legitimate Third-Party Channel

The Ghibli Museum, Mitaka sells no tickets at the door. Every admission is a date- and time-specified advance ticket, released at 10:00 JST on the 10th of each month for the following month, first come, through Lawson Ticket. The museum's own words are that ticket purchase for resale is not allowed. Tickets are named, the purchaser's name is printed on the face, ID may be checked at the entrance, and entry may be refused if the named person is absent. A resold ticket is therefore not a bargain, it is a ticket the museum's stated position says does not admit.

The only two channels the museum itself names are Lawson Ticket, at l-tike.com/ghibli with an English site available, and the Special Bus Tour by Sunrise Tours JTB, a full-day guided coach tour with museum admission included and prebooked by the operator. The bus tour is a guided day out at a tour price, not a ticket workaround, and Lawson remains the primary route on every page of this site. There is no legitimate third-party ticket channel beyond those two, and any marketplace listing that cannot say where its allocation comes from should be treated as a resold named ticket.