teamLab Borderless

There is no map, no route and no room labels. The works are projected, they respond to where people are standing, and they physically move between rooms – a flock of digital crows or a run of flowers will cross a doorway and continue in the next space, which is the whole conceit. You are meant to wander and to find things, and the museum deliberately refuses to tell you what you have missed.

That design has a consequence for planning. Budget two to three hours, not one. People who allow an hour see perhaps a third of it, and because there is no re-entry, stepping out for lunch ends the visit. Eat first.

Two rooms have their own queues inside the venue and are worth waiting for rather than around: the mirrored lamp room, where the lamps light in sequence as you move between them, and the tea house, where a bowl of tea has a flower projected into it that blooms while you drink and dies when the bowl is empty. Both are timed internally by staff and both are the things people remember.

The adult price starts at ¥3,600 and moves with demand. A quiet weekday morning in a shoulder month is at the bottom of that range; a Saturday evening in a holiday week is well above it. This is airline pricing applied to a museum, and it rewards the same behaviour – book early, and be flexible about the slot rather than the date.

Because tickets are date and time specific, they are also the least forgiving purchase in this guide. A late train, a slow lunch or a mixed-up venue does not get refunded. If your schedule for that day has any uncertainty in it, put Borderless at the start of the day rather than at the end.

Children under a certain height enter free and there are reduced rates for older children; the exact bands are set on the booking site and change with the pricing calendar, so we do not print a figure here that would be wrong by the time you read it.

Unlike Planets, you keep your shoes on and stay dry. The floors are dark and some of the works are viewed from below, so mirrored floors mean skirts are awkward – the venue provides shorts at the entrance for anyone who wants them, and it is a routine request rather than an embarrassing one.

Photography is allowed and tripods, selfie sticks and flash are not. The rooms are genuinely dark; a phone will struggle and a fast lens will not. Accept that the pictures will be worse than the experience and you will enjoy it considerably more.

Azabudai Hills itself is worth twenty minutes on either side of the booking. It opened in November 2023, the central tower is the tallest building in Japan, and the garden plaza the museum sits under is free to walk. Combine it with a drink in Otemachi or with the Nezu Museum, twenty minutes west, rather than trying to bolt it onto anything in the east of the city.