40 best Golden Week 2026 events in Tokyo

This open-air observation deck on the rooftop of Shibuya Scramble Square boasts 360-degree views of the city and you can see all of Tokyo’s major landmarks including Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Skytree and even Mt Fuji on a clear day. What's more, the observation deck boasts a stunning rooftop bar that's gearing up to reopen just in time for Golden Week on April 29.

You can order snacks and drinks such as beer, wine, cocktails and mocktails at the bar, which will be open from 4pm until 10pm every evening, giving guests a chance to catch the sunset as well as Tokyo’s stunning skyline at night.

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 (¥5,980; ¥4,980 on Apr-Jun weekdays excluding hols) option includes everything from barbecue beef, pork and lamb to veggies, yakisoba noodles, fried garlic rice, sausages and even ice pops. It includes an all-you-can-drink selection of eight kinds of beers including Kirin and Heineken, in addition to whisky, sours, wine and soft drinks.

Continuing from last year, the beer garden is offering a special all-you-can-drink craft beer option for an additional ¥1,500. The selection includes four craft beer options from Spring Valley Brewery, like the Hojun Lager 496 and Jazzberry. 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.

Popular German craft beer brand Schmatz takes over the Lumine Ikebukuro rooftop with its annual beer garden serving modern German cuisine. The premium all-you-can drink plan features three original craft beers, plus a range of beer cocktails including shandy gaff, cassis beer, mango beer and even a peach weizen. Additionally, there are regular cocktails, highballs, wines and soft drinks to choose from as well. 

The standard barbecue plan with the premium 2-hour all-you-can-drink option will set you back ¥6,500, and includes spare ribs, beef shoulder loin, specialty sausages, chicken, corn and an array of veggies to grill. If you're looking to save, the standard all-you-can-drink lager beer plan at ¥6,000 is worth considering too.

Make a reservation via the official website.

With sun, sea, sand and excellent movies, it’s no wonder that the Zushi Beach Film Festival is a popular fixture on the Golden Week calendar. This open-air cinema in Kanagawa prefecture is organised by Cinema Caravan, a group of artists and creatives who plan community events around the world. Every year it brings this event to Zushi, with movie screenings on the beach plus food stalls, a bazaar and live entertainment.

The 13-day festival is screening a variety of Japanese and international films; a few of them are in English with Japanese subtitles. Every day is a different movie and the show starts at a different time. You'll find the film schedule here.

The UNU farmers’ market is one of Tokyo’s longest running and best-attended markets. Taking place every weekend in front of the university’s Aoyama headquarters, this one always attracts a knowledgeable crowd. Organic and local fare is readily available every Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, with the farmers themselves happy to provide details about their wares. Plus, there's always a few food trucks on hand if you wish to enjoy a quick meal.

Do note that the market will be cancelled in the case of rain. Check the event Instagram for the latest updates.

Katsushika Hokusai is all the rage in Tokyo. Last year saw several acclaimed exhibitions dive into the ukiyo-e master’s ginormous oeuvre, and the Edo native’s iconic art has also been the subject of some pretty remarkable reinterpretations lately.

Next up in highlighting the printmaking genius is the National Museum of Western Art, whose exhibition ‘Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji from the Iuchi Collection’ marks the first public unveiling of this remarkable group of works placed on deposit at the museum in 2024.

The exhibition showcases all 46 prints from Hokusai’s iconic series Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji (c. 1830–33), alongside two additional impressions of his most beloved masterpieces, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (commonly known as ‘The Great Wave’) and Clear Day with a Southern Breeze (known as ‘Red Fuji’). You can look forward to exceptionally well-preserved impressions, including a rare indigo-printed ‘Blue Fuji’ version of Clear Day with a Southern Breeze.

Bringing together all 48 works, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience Hokusai’s enduring vision of Mt Fuji within Japan’s premier museum of Western art – a fitting setting for appreciating his art’s timeless dialogue between East and West.

Hirohiko Araki began serialising JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1986, launching a saga that has since spanned decades, generations of protagonists and shifting aesthetic paradigms. Renowned for its flamboyant characters, bold compositions and philosophical undercurrents, JoJo stands apart for its synthesis of classical art, fashion, music and pop culture. With cumulative circulation exceeding 120 million copies, the series has become a global phenomenon, while Araki himself has become recognised as a singular figure bridging manga and contemporary art.

From January 8 to June 28, the Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage Tokyo Gallery presents this three-part exhibition that foregrounds Araki’s work through the lens of fine-art printmaking. The exhibition has previously been shown in San Francisco and Kyoto, but this marks the first time Araki’s lithographs and lenticular works are displayed in Tokyo.

To allow visitors to encounter as wide a variety of works as possible, the exhibition unfolds in three rotations: Part 1 (January 8–February 23), Part 2 (March 3–April 19) and Part 3 (April 28–June 28). At the heart of the display are nine lithographic prints, produced in 2025 at the request of Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage and representing Araki’s first foray into lithography. Unlike conventional manga printing, which reduces drawings to stark black-and-white data, lithography preserves the artist’s hand with remarkable fidelity. Drawing directly onto metal plates with lithographic pencils and chalk, Araki has embraced the medium’s irreversibility: lines cannot be erased, lending each mark a palpable tension and decisiveness.

The resulting prints, featuring figures such as Jotaro Kujo and Dio, reveal a new intimacy with Araki’s lines, from the controlled force of slow strokes to the rhythmic energy of rapid shading. Each work is produced in an edition of 100, printed by master lithographer Satoru Itazu.

Complementing these are lenticular works depicting protagonists from Parts 1 through 6 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Utilising a technique with roots in early 20th-century optical experimentation, these prints create the illusion of depth and motion, activated only through the viewer’s movement. As one shifts position, time seems to unfold within a single image – an effect that resonates with the manipulation of duration and perspective, a familiar technique in manga.

Together, the lithographic and lenticular works position JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure as an evolving artistic practice – and one that continues to expand the possibilities of manga within the broader history of visual art.

The historic Shiseido Gallery presents a tribute to the visionary graphic designer Masayoshi Nakajo. Five years after his passing, the exhibition revisits Nakajo’s long and influential relationship with the cosmetics company through around 200 works spanning more than four decades.

Nakajo played a pivotal role in shaping Shiseido’s visual culture, producing posters, packaging and advertising designs that blended playful experimentation with refined elegance. Visitors will encounter iconic graphics created for Shiseido Parlour, including biscuit packaging, wrapping papers and promotional posters, alongside original drawings shown publicly for the first time.

A central focus of the exhibition is Nakajo’s work as art director of Hanatsubaki, Shiseido’s influential cultural magazine. A special reading corner allows visitors to browse some 350 issues published between 1982 and 2011, offering insight into his distinctive editorial approach, where typography, illustration and photography interact in dynamic visual rhythms.

Known for his free-hand compositions and intuitive use of form, Nakajo once said he always chose ‘the design most likely to sing’. This exhibition captures that spirit, where letters become melody, images move like choreography, and graphic design reveals its expressive, almost musical potential.

Ron Mueck has long been celebrated for redefining figurative sculpture through extraordinary craftsmanship and emotional acuity. After early work in film and advertising, the Australian-born, UK-based artist emerged on the contemporary art scene in the mid-1990s, gaining international attention with Pinocchio (1996) and Dead Dad (1996-97), the latter exhibited in the landmark ‘Sensation’ show at London’s Royal Academy in 1997.

Over the decades, his meticulously crafted human figures, rendered at startlingly altered scales, have probed themes of vulnerability, solitude, resilience and the fragile complexity of existence. With a rare and limited oeuvre of about fifty works, each sculpture distills months or even years of observation and reflection, resulting in pieces that feel at once hyper-real and quietly enigmatic.

From April 29 to September 23, the Mori Art Museum hosts the artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan in eighteen years. Organised in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the exhibition gathers eleven works tracing Mueck’s evolution, including six making their Japanese debut. Its monumental centrepiece is the Japan premiere of Mass (2016-17), an immersive installation of 100 giant skulls reconfigured to reflect the museum’s architecture. Other highlights include Angel (1997), Woman with Shopping (2013) and the iconic In Bed (2005), each inviting viewers into a deeply intimate emotional space.

Complementing the sculptures, photographs and films by Gautier Deblonde offer a glimpse into Mueck’s studio practice, revealing the quiet rigour behind some of contemporary art’s most affecting works.

The Tokyo Station Gallery presents the first major exhibition in Japan to feature the works of Swiss artist Karl Walser (1877–1943), who built a multifaceted career that spanned painting, illustration, book design and stage production. Bringing together approximately 150 pieces, many shown for the first time, the retrospective is especially notable for its focus on the time Walser spent in Japan.

Closely associated with the Modernist Berlin Secession movement, Walser’s art blends the somber tonalities of fin-de-siècle aesthetics with refined, luminous colour, producing images marked by an enduring sense of mystery. Long overshadowed by his younger brother, the writer Robert Walser, his oeuvre is now receiving renewed scholarly and public attention.

The exhibition traces Walser’s evolution from his early Symbolist-inflected paintings and Jugendstil-inspired drawings to his prolific output as an illustrator and designer for major literary figures. But its most compelling part highlights the artist’s 1908 journey to Japan, undertaken during a period of personal crisis. Travelling through Tokyo, Kyoto and Miyazu, Walser produced a remarkable body of watercolours and sketches depicting festivals, landscapes and everyday scenes. Rarely exhibited, these works stand out for their vivid chromatic sensitivity and documentary value.

Further sections explore his collaborations in theatre and mural painting, revealing an artist whose practice consistently bridged visual art, literature and performance, and whose vision continues to resonate across disciplines.

For one of the best shows of wisteria in this region, you'll have a make a day trip to Ashikaga Flower Park in Tochigi prefecture. The annual, ever popular Fujinohana Monogatari Ofuji Festival runs from April 11 to May 20, with the evening light-up set for April 18 to May 20. 

The park is one of Japan’s top destinations for wisteria, boasting 350 trees that bloom from mid-April to mid-May. The stunning flowers, which dangle from wooden trellises, come in a riot of colours including violet, blue, pink, white and yellow blossoms. Each colour tends to bloom at different times: pink first, followed by purple, white and then yellow wisteria.

Prepare your ponchos and panniers, as Harajuku J-fashion icon Sebastian Masuda has opened his first large-scale solo exhibition in years in Hyper Museum Hanno. The exhibition, running from March 14 to August 30, is packed with psychedelic candy-coloured installation rooms, art pieces and sculptures by Masuda himself, created over the years and brought to Japan for the event.

The exhibition unfolds across six themed spaces presented in a loose chronology, tracing Masuda’s formative experiences and how he arrived at his own understanding of kawaii after navigating personal conflicts.

While it’s taking place a bit outside central Tokyo, the exhibition offers an approachable but deep dive into Harajuku kawaii while prompting a look at where the culture is headed next. Be sure to visit the museum pop-up shop, which stocks exclusive T-shirts, stickers, omamori amulets and more.

Tickets are now on sale via Asoview, Artsticker, Lawson Ticket and Seven Ticket.

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