Tokyo hides its art behind unmarked doors: a bathhouse turned gallery, a 400-year-old theatre rebuilt inside a skyscraper, museums in buildings by Kuma and Kurokawa. Three days spent in the city's studios, stages and collections rather than its crossings.
Ten blocks of flagship stores by Pritzker laureates: Herzog & de Meuron's bubble-glass Prada Aoyama (2003), SANAA's Dior, Toyo Ito's concrete-lattice Tod's and Kengo Kuma's stacked-cedar Sunny Hills. Shops open at 11:00, so mornings belong to the facades.
Kengo Kuma's 2009 bamboo-lined entrance corridor leads to Kaichiro Nezu's collection of 7,400 pieces — Chinese bronzes, Buddhist scrolls and the National Treasure Irises screens by Ogata Korin. Open 10:00–17:00, closed Mondays. Behind it, a 17,000 sqm garden with four teahouses.
Kisho Kurokawa's final major work (2007): a 160-metre undulating glass wall and two inverted concrete cones holding cafes mid-air. Japan's largest exhibition space at 14,000 sqm, with no permanent collection — everything is temporary. Open 10:00–18:00, Fridays to 20:00, closed Tuesdays.
Contemporary art on the 53rd floor of Roppongi Hills, focused on Asian artists and open until 22:00 — the latest closing museum in the city. Admission includes the Tokyo City View observation deck one floor below, where the skyline goes on past the horizon.
Founded 1872, Japan's oldest and largest museum: 120,000 objects including 89 National Treasures. Skip the main Honkan first and start in the Gallery of Horyu-ji Treasures, a Yoshio Taniguchi glass box holding 7th-century gilt-bronze Buddhas. Open 9:30–17:00, closed Mondays.
The 2013 Kengo Kuma tower rebuilt the 1889 theatre facade at its base. The fifth-floor rooftop garden and the basement Kobikicho Hiroba — selling stage-prop souvenirs, kumadori makeup goods and bento — are open to anyone without a ticket.
Hitomakumi tickets admit you to one act only, sold same-day from a street-level window for a fourth of the full price. Seats are in the fourth-balcony gallery; English audio guides explain the mie poses and the calls shouted from the audience by fan clubs.
A wooden yose hall from 1946 running rakugo — one seated storyteller, a fan, a cloth — plus paper-cutting, juggling and manzai. Shows run continuously from noon; the evening programme starts around 17:00 and ends near 21:00, and you may enter at any point.
Sculptor Fumio Asakura's own 1935 house and studio: a black concrete atelier joined to a wooden residence around a water courtyard he designed himself. Cat bronzes fill the rooms; the roof garden was used to grow vegetables. Open 9:30–16:30, closed Mondays and Thursdays.
A 170-metre shotengai of about 60 family-run shops that survived both the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 firebombing, reached down the 'sunset staircase'. The adjoining cemetery holds Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, along with rows of cherry trees.
Kunio Maekawa's 1975 brick-clad building, sunk below ground so it does not overshadow Ueno Park. Beyond the ticketed blockbusters, its rental galleries host hundreds of artist-collective and calligraphy-society shows a year, all free to walk into.
A hillside of stone-paved alleys that was a geisha quarter from the 1850s; around 20 geisha still work here. Black wooden fences, ryotei with no signage, and Akagi Shrine rebuilt in glass and cedar by Kengo Kuma in 2010 sit within a few streets of each other.