The National Museum Of Western Art Tickets

A minute from JR Ueno Station's Park Exit, inside a park better known for Japanese art, stands Tokyo's only national museum devoted entirely to the Western tradition. The National Museum of Western Art (Kokuritsu Seiyo Bijutsukan) holds paintings, sculpture and prints from the European canon, and its permanent collection costs 500 JPY, one of the lowest door prices of any national museum in the city. The building sits at 7-7 Ueno-koen, Taito-ku, beside the Tokyo National Museum and the National Museum of Nature and Science, which makes it one third of the standard Ueno museum circuit. This page covers the door price, the concessions, the free days, the Grutto Pass position, the Monday closure trap and the maintenance shutdown coming in early 2027.

What Are The Ticket Prices At The National Museum Of Western Art?

The permanent collection costs 500 JPY, about 3.26 US dollars, at the door. College students pay 250 JPY. High school students and younger, anyone over 65, and visitors with a physical or mental disability plus one companion enter free. Special exhibitions are priced separately, and their tickets also admit you to the permanent collection.

That last rule is the one worth remembering when a big show is running. A special exhibition ticket is not an extra on top of your 500 JPY: it replaces it. If you are visiting for a loan exhibition anyway, you do not need to buy the permanent collection ticket at all, because the exhibition ticket already covers the galleries.

The concession structure is generous by Tokyo standards. The over-65 rule and the disability rule both include proof of age or the relevant certificate at the ticket window, and the disability concession covers one companion as well as the certificate holder. High school students and younger enter free with no ticket purchase at all, which makes the museum one of the cheaper options for families with teenagers in Ueno Park.

Special exhibition prices move with each show, so the figure for the exhibition currently running is on the museum's own visit page rather than on any fixed price list. The museum does not publish a single standing special-exhibition rate, and any number quoted in advance of a show opening should be treated as provisional.

For comparison within the same park, the Tokyo National Museum charges 1,000 JPY for its collection exhibitions, so a full Ueno art day across both museums costs 1,500 JPY at adult rates before any concessions or free days are applied.

How Far Ahead Do You Have To Book?

You can walk in on most days without a ticket, but the museum's own quiet days are the safe bet for the permanent collection. The online channel is e-tix, which sells the collection ticket and a separate ticket for each special exhibition. The museum ticket window sells same-day tickets on the day.

The National Museum of Western Art sits in the walk-in category on this site's booking axis, with the caveat that crowd levels swing hard around popular special exhibitions. A permanent collection visit on an ordinary weekday needs no planning at all. A headline loan exhibition on a weekend afternoon is a different matter, and that is when the e-tix route earns its keep: buying the exhibition ticket online removes the queue at the window and, on the busiest days, the risk that same-day sales slow down.

There is no timed entry system here. Unlike teamLab Borderless or teamLab Planets TOKYO, both of which run strict timed-slot ticketing and cannot be entered without a pre-booked slot, this museum assigns no entry time. You arrive, you queue briefly if the window is busy, and you go in. Last admission is 30 minutes before closing, which on a Friday or Saturday evening means 19:30.

What a sold-out slot means here is narrower than at the timed venues: it applies to special exhibition e-tix allocations on peak days, not to the building. If an exhibition's online allocation is exhausted, the ticket window still sells on the day while tickets last. The permanent collection itself has no allocation and no sell-out condition in normal operation.

When Is The Museum Free?

The permanent collection is free on the second Sunday of every month, Kawasaki Free Sunday, on 18 May for International Museum Day, and on 3 November for Culture Day. These are free days for the permanent collection only. Special exhibitions keep their own pricing on every one of those dates.

The second-Sunday rule is the most useful one for a visitor building an itinerary, because it recurs monthly rather than annually. If your trip happens to straddle a second Sunday, the permanent collection galleries cost nothing for everyone, with no concession check and no ticket needed for the free entry. The two calendar-date free days, 18 May and 3 November, draw larger crowds precisely because they are widely known, so a free visit on those dates trades money for queue time.

It is worth being precise about what these days are, because free days are not general free admission. This museum is not one of Tokyo's free museums. 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. The National Museum of Western Art charges 500 JPY on ordinary days, and its free days are scheduled exceptions to that charge, scoped to the permanent collection.

The National Museum of Nature and Science, across the park, runs the same 18 May and 3 November free days on its own permanent exhibitions, so a well-timed Ueno visit can stack two national museums at zero admission cost on either date. The second-Sunday rule, by contrast, is specific to this museum among the Ueno venues.

The full schedule of free days, concession terms and current exhibition pricing is on the museum's own visitor information page, which is the right place to confirm a date before you build a day around it.

What Does The Grutto Pass Cover Here?

The Grutto Pass gets you a discount on the permanent collection here, not free entry, and it does not cover special exhibitions. The pass excludes both teamLab Borderless and teamLab Planets TOKYO, the Ghibli Museum, Warner Bros. Studio Tour Tokyo and Sanrio Puroland, so it cannot substitute for any of those tickets.

The Tokyo Museum Grutto Pass is a 2,500 JPY card covering more than a hundred facilities across the city, and every listing on it is either free entry or a discount, decided facility by facility. This museum is on the discount side: you show the pass at the permanent collection ticket point and pay a reduced rate rather than walking in free. That distinction matters when you are doing the arithmetic on whether the pass pays for itself, because only free-entry venues count at full door price toward the 2,500 JPY outlay.

The special exhibitions are outside the pass entirely, which is the pattern at most facilities on the scheme. If your visit is built around a loan exhibition, the pass contributes nothing to that ticket, though it still applies to the permanent collection element if you are buying that separately.

The exclusions list is long and worth knowing before you buy. Beyond the five named above, the pass also excludes the National Art Center, Tokyo, 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 and Edo Wonderland Nikko Edomura, plus special exhibitions at most facilities. The authoritative breakdown is on the official Grutto Pass site.

Within Ueno Park, the pass position differs by museum: the Tokyo National Museum gets a discount on its collection exhibitions, while this museum gets a discount on its permanent collection. Neither gets free entry, so a Grutto-based Ueno day is a discounted day, not a free one.

What Are The Opening Hours And Closures?

The museum opens 09:30 to 17:30 and stays open until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays. It closes on Mondays, opens on a national-holiday Monday and then closes the next day instead. Last admission is 30 minutes before closing. The museum also closes 28 December to 1 January.

The Monday closure is the trap that catches most first-time Ueno visitors, because all three of the park's national museums shut on the same day. If your Tokyo itinerary has a Monday in it, Ueno's museum row is dark, and the standard alternative is Roppongi, where the National Art Center, Tokyo opens on Mondays and closes on Tuesdays instead. Note that the other Roppongi option, the Mori Art Museum, is closed between exhibitions, so which Roppongi venue is available depends on the exhibition calendar rather than on the weekday.

The holiday rule is the detail that breaks naive planning. When a national holiday falls on a Monday, this museum opens that day and closes the following weekday, so a visit planned for the Tuesday after a holiday Monday can find the doors shut. The rule is standard across the Monday-closing museums in this lineup, and it shifts the closure rather than cancelling it.

One longer closure is already announced: the permanent exhibition closes for extended facility maintenance from 12 January 2027 to 19 March 2027, reopening 20 March 2027. Anyone planning a trip in that window should check the museum's own visit page for what remains open, since the closure applies to the permanent exhibition rather than the whole building, and special exhibition programming in that period is a separate question.

The Friday and Saturday late opening until 20:00 is the quiet planning advantage. An evening visit after 17:00 on those days is the closest thing this museum offers to a crowd-free window, and last admission at 19:30 still leaves a full hour inside.

How Do You Get There And What Else Is Nearby?

JR Ueno Station's Park Exit puts you about one minute from the museum. Keisei Ueno and Tokyo Metro Ueno are a 7 to 8 minute walk. The address is 7-7 Ueno-koen, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0007, inside Ueno Park, which also holds the Tokyo National Museum and the National Museum of Nature and Science.

That one-minute walk from the Park Exit is the shortest station link of the three Ueno national museums, and it makes this museum the easiest first stop if you arrive by JR. Visitors coming from Asakusa or the Ginza Line corridor will more likely arrive through Ueno station's other exits or via Keisei Ueno, adding the 7 to 8 minutes on foot through the park.

Ueno Park rewards a sequenced day. The Tokyo National Museum sits a ten-minute walk from the station and holds the Japanese collection; the National Museum of Nature and Science sits between the two; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, free to enter though charging per exhibition, rounds out the cluster. All of the Monday-closing venues in the park shut on the same day, so the sequencing question is really a weekday question.

For visitors building a wider Tokyo art itinerary, the timed-slot venues need separate planning. teamLab Borderless at Azabudai Hills and teamLab Planets TOKYO at Toyosu both require pre-booked timed entry and sit on no museum pass, so they cannot be folded into a Ueno day on impulse. This museum, by contrast, can be added to a plan the morning of, on any day it is open.

There is no timed entry, no advance-only requirement and no door-sales risk for the permanent collection. The only planning constraints that matter here are the Monday closure with its holiday shift, the year-end shutdown from 28 December to 1 January, and the 2027 maintenance window on the permanent exhibition.

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