December 2026
December opens Suntory's Lotus Sutra show and Okada Atsushi's photographs of Yururi Island's last horses, while the Orsay's Gleaners and Tate's Turners hang in Ueno through winter. Leonardo leaves the National Art Center on the 13th and Hiroshige's Edo leaves the Tokyo National Museum on the 20th, a week before the city shuts for New Year.
Suntory Museum of ArtOpens 12 December
A Kamakura-period elephant and lion, still in original paint and cut gold, probably once seated the bodhisattvas Fugen and Monju. Around them, sutras copied onto bronze, tiny clay pagodas and a Hiroshige print: making things as prayer.
Tokyo Photographic Art MuseumOpens 1 December
Horses left behind by kelp fishers on Yururi Island, off Nemuro, dwindled from twelve to two after Okada Atsushi first landed there in 2011. About 80 photographs of an island almost nobody is allowed onto, including the last pair.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumUntil 28 March
Millet's The Gleaners and Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhône head around 110 loans from the Musée d'Orsay, Realism through Symbolism. A greatest-hits show for first-timers to French painting; Tokyo Cheapo warns of serious queues and advises booking ahead.
National Museum of Western ArtUntil 21 February
Turner's glacier sketches hang opposite Olafur Eliasson's photographs of the same ice sheets melting. More than 80 works from Tate set Turner's avalanches and late, near-abstract light studies against Rothko, Katie Paterson and the Otolith Group.
Mori Art MuseumUntil 28 March
In Wave UFO, an 11-metre pod, your brainwaves become projected imagery; slots are limited and booked separately. Around it, three decades of Mariko Mori, from her anime-and-cosplay Cyborg photographs to Buddhist-inflected installations, 53 floors above Roppongi.
Yayoi Kusama MuseumUntil 31 January
Light runs up five floors: 1950s pastels where images emerge from darkness, paired gold and silver canvases, one mirror room alone on the fourth floor, then Narcissus Garden's steel balls on the roof. Tickets are online-only, in 90-minute slots.
The National Art Center, TokyoCloses 13 December
Leonardo's Portrait of a Woman, La Belle Ferronnière, in Japan for the first time: her body turns one way, her face another. More than 50 Louvre works around it, including Dürer's rhinoceros woodcut, made without his ever seeing one.
Tokyo National MuseumCloses 20 December
Hiroshige's sudden downpour over Ōhashi bridge belongs to the 1,025 prints collector Uchiyama Susumu gave the museum, hung as complete series in turn: the Tōkaidō, the Kiso Road, then One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Photographer Okada Atsushi's exhibition on Yururi Island, spanning 1950 to 2026, in the museum's basement-floor galleries.
Nezu Museum
Museum collection exhibition on East Asian lacquer techniques built on carving: chōshitsu, Kamakurabori, sōkin, tenshitsu and kinma.
Ōta Memorial Museum of Art
A survey spotlighting overlooked ukiyo-e artists working in the shadow of the medium's most famous names.
Suntory Museum of Art
Lavishly decorated sutras, Buddhist statues and paintings inspired by the Lotus Sutra, tracing how devotion to the text shaped Japanese art from antiquity to today.
Sumida Hokusai Museum
10th-anniversary show of Hokusai's Sumida views and the works born of his exchanges with Ota Nanpo and other writers, plus Hokusai prints that inspired later authors such as Masaoka Shiki.
Tokyo National Museum
Treasures from Daitokuji, the Kyoto Zen temple founded in 1326, and its sub-temples, shown for its 700th anniversary and including the Kizaemon Ido tea bowl (National Treasure).
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
First Tokyo solo show in 35 years for sculptor Tada Minami (1924-2014), spanning sculpture, chandeliers and architectural "light sculptures" across her 70-year career.
Ōta Memorial Museum of Art
Two-term exhibition tracing ukiyo-e depictions of nighttime scenes, centred on Katsushika Ōi's famous "Night Scene in the Yoshiwara."
SOMPO Museum of Art
Some 90 works by the French Fauvist, tracing his career and celebrated waterside scenes and Pont-Neuf series, on loan from major French museums.
The National Art Center, Tokyo
Over 50 Louvre masterpieces trace 15th-16th century Renaissance art, including the Japan debut of Leonardo da Vinci's "Portrait of a Woman" (La Belle Ferronnière).
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Roughly 200 modern Taiwanese artworks, archival material and contemporaneous Japanese pieces, exploring shared modernity across art, film, literature and music.
Japan Folk Crafts Museum
The museum's annual juried competition and sale of new handicrafts by contemporary makers, spanning ceramics, textiles, woodwork, lacquer, glass, metal, bamboo, straw and paper.
Tokyo National Museum
Special exhibition marking the gift of the Uchiyama Susumu collection, showing complete sets of Hiroshige's Tokaido, Kiso Road, and Edo landscape print series in rotation.
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
Autumn-themed works from the gallery's Terada Collection, including paintings by Nambata Tatsuoki, Matsumoto Yuko and Uchida Aguri.
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
Tanaka Ai (b. 1992) shows large mineral-pigment paintings on paper, including the 2026 Acting in the Phenofact pair, in the gallery's emerging-artist series.
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
Group show of contemporary Japanese artists exploring the ecosystems that adapt to city life, from roadside weeds to organisms coexisting with concrete.
Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum
Over 60 dresses, printed textiles and production materials from the Finnish design house Marimekko, with a video on its Helsinki print factory and work by designer Akira Minagawa.
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Special exhibition of 500 works and materials by Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), covering his "Yumeji style" images of women, paintings, prints and graphic design.
National Museum of Western Art
About 50 prints and drawings, plus three paintings, by 19 artists show how nineteenth-century Paris theatre, from Delacroix's Shakespeare to Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, entered art.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumFree
Free 100th-anniversary archives exhibition retracing the museum's century through documents, photographs and the people behind it.
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
MOMAT Collection Focus show on Japanese artists who lived in Paris from the pre-war era through the postwar period, including Fujita Tsuguharu and Okamoto Taro.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumFree
Free 100th-anniversary thematic show pairing sculpture, photography, text and painting by five artists exploring dialogue with the world.
National Museum of Western Art
Marking Japan's Shōwa centennial, this display traces conservation and restoration work at the NMWA from its 1959 founding through 1989.
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
Contemporary architects and designers reinterpret Kamo no Chōmei's 13th-century "Hōjōki" and its 9m² hermitage, rethinking what it means to dwell. Directed by architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto.
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Six photographers and video artists from China and Japan in dialogue, exploring resonances born from the intersection of different cultures, times and personal experiences.
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Five contemporary artists using AI, CG and stop-motion reassemble existing memories, materials and technologies into new imagery, questioning how we perceive information today.
Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo
First major retrospective in Japan in 50 years of Italian landscape painter Antonio Fontanesi (1818-1882), who taught early Japanese Western-style painters in Tokyo.
Artizon Museum
The seventh Jam Session pairing sees contemporary artist Fujii Hikaru respond to 22 works from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection, inverting Plato's cave allegory to question the structure of truth.
Tokyo Station Gallery
Retrospective of about 130 works by the Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup, including oil paintings and woodblock prints depicting seasonal landscapes near Jolster Lake, Norway.
Artizon Museum
Over 100 paintings from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection show how Japanese artists studying in Europe since the Meiji era, including Kuroda Seiki and Fujita Tsuguharu, engaged with Western art traditions.
Yayoi Kusama Museum
Kusama's work seen through the theme of light, from 1950s drawings to recent mirror rooms and metallic sculptures where light becomes the work itself.
The National Art Center, Tokyo
A retrospective on three pioneering shojo-manga artists, tracing their careers from the late 1960s to today through original drawings and archival material.
National Museum of Nature and Science
The museum's first special exhibition on sex as a theme, covering the diversity of sex in animals and plants through form, behaviour, sex determination and parenting.
National Museum of Western Art
A special exhibition placing J.M.W. Turner's work in dialogue with contemporary art, exploring the sublime in landscape and light.
National Museum of Nature and Science
A commemorative exhibition marking 150 years since the birth of bacteriologist Noguchi Hideyo, tracing his life's work and humanity's ongoing fight against infectious disease.
Mori Art Museum
Japan's first major Mariko Mori retrospective since 2002, spanning three decades from her 1990s Cyborg series to recent installations shaped by Buddhist philosophy and science.
Mori Art Museum
Showcase for Katayama Mari, first Grand Prize winner of the Mori Art Award, whose analogue photography, embroidery and needlework extend the boundaries of her own body.
Mori Art Museum
New ceramic sculptures by Santa Fe-based Brie Ruais, made after a residency at Shigaraki and research into Japanese clay and ceramic history, shaped through full-body movement.
Mori Art Museum
Three films by Thai artist Jakrawal Nilthamrong, centred on Rhizome (2022), where a man drifts on a raft above a flooded world. Screened 18:00-22:00, about 39 minutes in total.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
Around 110 works from the Musée d'Orsay spanning painting, sculpture, decorative arts and photography, including Monet, Van Gogh and Renoir.
Ghibli Museum, Mitaka
Recreation of illustrator Yuriko Yamawaki's studio, exploring her picture-book collaborations with Rieko Nakagawa and her influence on Hayao Miyazaki.
6 Jan 2027Japan Folk Crafts Museum
i8 Jan 2027Tokyo National Museum
i9 Jan 2027SOMPO Museum of Art
i16 Jan 2027Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
i16 Jan 2027Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
i16 Jan 2027Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
i16 Jan 2027Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum
i19 Jan 2027Tokyo National Museum
26 Jan 2027Ōta Memorial Museum of Art
30 Jan 2027Nezu Museum
5 Feb 2027Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
5 Feb 202721_21 DESIGN SIGHT
6 Feb 2027Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
6 Feb 2027Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
i19 Feb 2027Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo
i20 Feb 2027Tokyo Station Gallery
20 Feb 2027Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
i23 Feb 2027Artizon Museum
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
