Things to do in Tokyo today

Go on a floral outing this summer to enjoy the sight of over 20,000 hydrangeas at the 24th annual Hakkeijima Hydrangea Festival. Held for roughly three weeks from June 1 to June 23, this free event lets you explore the island of Hakkeijima (about 30 minutes by train from Yokohama) and its eight hydrangea spots. Highlights include the indigenous Hakkei-blue hydrangea, a variety that was created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the island’s Hakkeijima Sea Paradise theme park. Collect stamps from at least five of the eight hydrangea spots and you’ll receive a ¥500 voucher to use at the nearby Mitsui Outlet Park Yokohama Bayside shopping mall.   Whenever you need to rest your feet and recharge, restaurants across the island are serving special flower-themed drinks and desserts. The most eye-catching of them all is the hydrangea lemon tea (¥500) sold at Cable Car Coffee. Stamp rally is held daily from 10am-4pm

Tokyo Tower's alternative to the ubiquitous summer beer gardens is welcoming the outdoor drinking season with a double dose of whisky highballs. Head to the terrace at the base of the tower for a lengthy menu of highballs combined with a variety of drinking snacks (think karaage and grilled bacon). There's also a meatier option on the roof of the Tower Foot Town building. The Tokyo Tower Rooftop Highball Garden serves up all-you-can-eat jingisukan, the Hokkaido-born lamb barbecue named after the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. Two hours of all-you-can-drink alcohol and limitless jingisukan can be had for ¥5,800 (teens aged 13-19 ¥3,800, primary school students ¥2,800, children aged 4-6 ¥1,800, all with non-alcoholic drinks, of course). The Tokyo Tower Cho-Ten Highball Garden at the base of the tower is open until October 6, from 4pm-10pm on weekdays and 12noon-10pm on Sat, Sun & holidays. The Tokyo Tower Rooftop Highball Garden is open until October 14, from 5pm-9.30pm daily. Make your reservations here.

Step into an enchanted digital forest in this collaborative exhibition between teamLab and Galaxy. Now in its third iteration, the interactive experience is based on the concept of catching different digital creatures to study them before releasing them back into their habitat. As it's a digital art experience, you'll be using an app on the Galaxy smartphone to collect different prehistoric animals in the mystical forest. Be gentle when approaching these critters! If you try to touch them they might run and disappear into the forest. If you're lucky, they might become curious instead and turn towards you. Nevertheless, the exercise here is to point your phone camera at them, release a Study Arrow in their direction, and capture them onto your screen so that you can learn more about their nature. You can also work together with other visitors and shepherd the dinosaurs projected on the floor. This allows you to then deploy the Study Net and capture them into your phone. Once you've done studying them, you can release them back into the space. While the exhibit is free, reservations are required so as to avoid overcrowding the venue. Each session is an hour long, with the exhibition open from 11am until 7pm daily. You can book a timeslot as early as three days in advance via the event website.

The Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, established in 2018, is a prize intended to encourage mid-career artists to make further breakthroughs in their work by providing winners with several years of continuous support. Here, the two winners of the award’s fourth edition each present shows that, despite their creative diversity, both involve visitors and their actions becoming key elements of the art. Through this, both shows lead audiences to examine their relationships: with fellow humans, animals, and society’s expectations. Saeborg, born in 1981 and based in Tokyo, creates and performs as a latex bodysuit-clad ‘imperfect cyborg, half human and half toy’ that enables the female behind this guise to transcend such characteristics as age and gender. Here Saeborg presents ‘I Was Made for Loving You’, for which a section of the venue has been transformed into a life-sized toy farm. Visitors will experience a highly immersive installation-performance that transcends the boundaries between the body and synthetic materials, and between human and animal. Michiko Tsuda (born in 1980 and working in Ishikawa prefecture) presents ‘Life is Delaying’, an installation that uses video to explore the notion of physicality. The work recreates the private world experienced by a family at home through the perspective of someone operating an old-school video camera. The piece was inspired by Tsuda’s childhood memory of a video camera appearing in her family residence. Here, fictitious documentation

Kyuyoh Ishikawa, born 1945 in Fukui prefecture, has truly dedicated his life to Japanese-style calligraphy. This encompasses not only research and criticism, in his capacity as a professor at Kyoto Seika University, but also the creation of a vast body of calligraphy work that has helped keep the art form vibrant and contemporary. This exhibition is a comprehensive overview of Ishikawa’s own calligraphy, comprising around 300 works divided between the show’s two month-long parts (first half, June 8–30; second half, July 3–28). These creations convey how, from the earliest days of his career, Ishikawa has sought to avoid the constraints of tradition. As demonstrated by pieces seen in the exhibition’s first half, many of which are based upon classic tales such as ‘The Fifty-five Tales of Genji’, this was the case even when he was working with the earliest elements of the Japanese literary canon. The second half of the exhibition, meanwhile, is based upon Ishikawa’s own assertion that calligraphy is not simply the writing of characters: rather, it is a means of expressing words. This notion is explored through work whose inspiration ranges from haiku poetry to the chaos of the modern world. Exhibited during this time is one of Ishikawa's most renowned pieces from his Gray Period, an 85m-long work inspired by religious text. The exhibition is closed July 1-2.

Looking for a weekend getaway to see hydrangeas in nature without leaving Tokyo proper? Check out the hydrangea festival at Wonderful Nature Village next to Tokyo Summerland, taking place from June 8 to July 7. Here you’ll find a sea of white hydrangeas blooming on the slopes of a hill. This section of the sprawling park alone features over 15,000 hydrangeas and they are expected to hit peak bloom around late June. Aside from the white Anabelle hydrangea, the park also cultivates beautiful blue hydrangeas Kurohime and Ezohoshino that are indigenous to Japan. These varieties will likely reach peak bloom between mid- and late June. While you’re there for these summer blooms, why not beat the heat with a refreshing splash at the nearby Tokyo Summerland? This super popular water park on the fringes of Tokyo boasts a large indoor pool for all weather conditions as well as a 650m-long outdoor pool with flowing water. (Note: advance tickets are required for Tokyo Summerland.) To get there, take the Keio line from Shinjuku to Keio Hachioji Station. From there, hop on a local bus and you'll reach Wonderful Nature Village in about 35 minutes. For more details, including other bus connections from Keio Hachioji and Akigawa stations, see the venue website (in Japanese only). The hydrangea festival takes place daily from 9am to 5pm.

The debut Tokyo solo show from Los Angeles-based artist, filmmaker and writer Miranda July is one that is pertinent to our social media-fixated times. F.A.M.I.L.Y. (the initials standing for ‘Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You’), taking place at luxury house Prada’s landmark Aoyama building, is an Instagram-facilitated video installation born from the artist’s favoured method of initiating exchanges that she controls to some degree, while simultaneously inviting her counterpart in the dialogue to express desires and perform actions. An array of screens span a section of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed flagship store, showing the results of a year-long artistic experiment in which July collaborated with seven complete strangers via Instagram. The artist sent these individuals a series of prompts, with their subsequent video responses then manipulated in her studio using the basic ‘cut-out’ tool of a social media video editing app. These surreal performances see July and her participants together explore intimacy and personal boundaries through a new form of physical language, with the artist hoping the project might achieve what she sees as one of the promises of Instagram: that the user is looked at so lovingly that they finally ‘feel okay’.

From now until June 23, you can catch hydrangeas blooming in one of Tokyo’s most picturesque Japanese gardens. Rikugien is currently celebrating the onset of summer with approximately 1,000 hydrangeas of 15 varieties.  The highlight of the event is arguably the mountain hydrangeas, an elegant variant of the species that has bloomed on the Japanese archipelago since ancient times. These flowers may not have the conventional appearance of a common hydrangea, but they are still beautiful in their own right while being of modest colour and size. At the garden you’ll also find the vibrant pink Satsuki azaleas, which are also native to the mountains of Japan. Entrance to Rikugien costs ¥300 (free for primary students and younger). Posters explaining the different varieties of hydrangea will have both Japanese and English text.

Taking over the expansive outdoor lawn within the children’s play area at Meiji Shrine’s Outer Gardens, the Forest Beer Garden distinguishes itself from other boozy events in town with its lush green surrounds and bubbling waterfall. The popular two-hour all-you-can-eat (¥5,880) option includes everything from barbecue beef, pork and lamb to veggies, yakisoba noodles, grilled onigiri and even ice pops. It includes an all-you-can-drink selection of seven kinds of beers including Kirin and Heineken, in addition to whisky, sours, wine and soft drinks. Despite being one of the largest beer gardens in Tokyo with a capacity for around 1,000 people, the event can get extremely busy at weekends, so advance bookings are recommended via the website.

Craft, creativity, heritage and modernity all converge in this immersive visual journey through the 187-year history of American jewellery maestros Tiffany. Within the gallery space of Tokyo Node, situated in the soaring Toranomon Hills Station Tower complex, ten rooms are filled with hundreds of captivating creations that range from one-of-a-kind items to iconic accessories that has become part of popular culture. One standout amongst many is the very first iteration of Tiffany’s emblematic ‘Bird on a Rock’ brooch. This was conceived by longstanding Tiffany designer Jean Schlumberger, whose work for the brand won over clients including actresses Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo. As with many of Schlumberger’s works, this magnificent nature-themed piece reminds us that, for all of their luxury and glamour, diamonds are ultimately something derived from the earth itself. The exhibition also explores Tiffany’s relationship with Japan, which stretches back to the company’s earliest days. Many designers closely associated with Tiffany, including Elsa Peretti and Edward Chandler Moore, took inspiration from traditional Japanese arts, making ‘Tiffany Wonder’ a spiritual homecoming for some of the featured works. Tickets are available online. The exhibition is closed on the following dates: April 17 (5pm-8pm), April 22 (6.30pm-8pm), April 30 (5pm-8pm), May 8 (11.30am-1pm, 5pm-8pm), May 13 (6pm-8pm), May 16 (6pm-8pm).