Visiting the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo + Tips For Buying Tickets

One of our absolute highlights of Tokyo was the Ghibli Museum – a haven for all things Studio Ghibli, and a must-visit for any Studio Ghibli fan.

If you don’t know what Studio Ghibli is, they are a renowned Japanese animation studio, making incredible films since the mid-1980’s. They are basically the Japanese equivalent of Disney, and use traditional hand-drawn animation to bring beautiful stories to life. They are particularly notable for creating engaging characters like woodland spirits and sassy fire demons, they don’t shy away from political and societal issues, and Hayao Miyazaki has a knack for finding beauty in the ordinary.

For the record (and if you have no idea what I’m on about and fancy checking out some movies), my favourite Ghibli films are:
1. Howl’s Moving Castle
2. Kiki’s Delivery Service
3. Laputa: Castle In The Sky
4. My Neighbour Totoro

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I was going to include five, but there are several I couldn’t decide between. To be honest there aren’t many Ghibli films I don’t like – almost every film oozes charm, in the animation style, the art, the landscapes, the music, and the characters. Whimsical scenes mixed with darker themes and humour make them unique movies that appeal to both children and adults. They are also very accessible worldwide as they all have English versions with big name voice actors.

The Studio Ghibli museum offers a chance for an insight into the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, who’s now in his 80’s and insisting he’ll only stop making the animations once he can no longer hold a pencil, as well as some inner workings of the animations themselves.

The only thing is NO photos are allowed inside, so there aren’t many I can use in this post – but I did take a few outside.

Some of the highlights of the museum included:

The room of animations: The Beginnings Of Movement

The first room closest to the entrance is full of physical set-ups with illusions and animations. There are dioramas, zoetropes and kaleidoscopes; even full-scale projectors creating animated movies in front of your eyes. This is really an account of the process behind everything in animation, and it’s fascinating.

Saturn Theatre

There is a cinema room which displays a short film on rotation, and these change every few weeks. We had A Sumo Wrestler’s Tail, where little rodent-like creatures fight each other in the forest. One team always wins, and the losing fighters live in a nearby farmhouse. The elderly farmhouse owners find the creatures one day, causing panic. However instead of chasing them out of the house, the husband follows them and discovers their plight in the wrestling ring. He resolves to feed them and make them stronger, and it becomes a ritual that the elderly couple sneak out and watch the fights. At the end, the underdogs win! It’s a very sweet tale and has the trademark Ghibli humour injected into it, too.

All the films shown in the theatre are exclusive to the Ghibli Museum so you won’t find them anywhere else, and there’s exclusive merchandise for the current film in the gift shop.

To see what’s showing at the moment, check out the official website.

Hayao Miyazaki’s studio room: Where A Film Is Born

This is the best part of the whole museum – a rare insight into Miyazaki himself and his inspirations. I was surprised to open the first inspiration book to find the first few pages were all about his visit to Glasgow! I found it hard to believe that a city like Glasgow had inspired his architectural styles, and found myself wondering which films he’d added that into. In fact, he had a few books about Scotland, too.

The walls in this room are absolutely covered in drawings, animation panels, and books. There are desks set up with his art supplies, and piles and piles of books. It was just fascinating.

The only thing I will say is that there isn’t much actual information – this is very much a room to take at your own pace and look around at whatever you like. There are entire books of hand-drawn scenes later made into animations with original manuscripts, and I spent some time flicking through these. Really amazing seeing this versus the final product!

Temporary exhibition room

At the other end of the museum is a temporary exhibit, which at the moment (2024) is focusing on Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy And The Heron. This was his second Oscar win, and it’s just set up as an art gallery. To be honest it’s the room we spent the least time in, but it’s still interesting and it’s good that they have a part of the museum that changes regularly to give people a reason to go back.

Book shop

There’s a small bookshop on the way to the roof terrace, which is pretty awesome! I bought a couple of postcards, and they also had an art book of the museum itself which came with a poster. So cool! I would say this was the best souvenir for the museum.

This is separate to the actual gift shop which is on the opposite side of the museum.

Play area – with a giant Catbus!!!

Oh God, if I thought I could have got away with it, I would have been ALL OVER the… wait for it… life-size Catbus that you can CLIMB ON!!

Unfortunately it’s only for kids, and there were indeed kids playing on it. If it had been empty, I might have risked it!

You have to pass it to get to the rooftop terrace, so it’s unavoidable. It’s soooo cool!!

Rooftop terrace with the Robot Soldier

The only place you are allowed to take photos once in the museum is the rooftop terrace. There is a fantastic photo opportunity with the robot soldier from Laputa: Castle In The Sky. This was Studio Ghibli’s first ever movie under the official studio name, and it’s one of my favourites. So I was pretty ecstatic to be able to get a photo!

There are a couple of other things out there, including one of the blocks from the interior of the “planet”, all in a little rooftop garden.

Straw Hat Café

The one thing we didn’t have time to do was go into the café – but I’m not sure this was any real loss, because it seems like they just serve generic food like sandwiches and hot dogs. It’s a shame as it has so much potential to do more with the theme! Considering how all-out Japan goes on things like that, I’m surprised.

Tip: Fear not, we found a much better themed restaurant nearby – more on that below!

Gift shop: Mamma Aiuto

We ended our visit with the gift shop, hoping we’d have enough time to browse – which we did, thankfully! There is SO much cool stuff in there. Expensive collectibles, rows of cabinets full of pin badges… to be honest, a lot of it is things you’re able to get elsewhere, but there are a few exclusives, such as merchandise for the short film in the theatre, and it’s great for a browse as it’s pretty comprehensive.

The name comes from the sky pirates in Porco Rosso (this is a really underrated Ghibli film in my opinion – I loved it!).

Buying tickets for the Studio Ghibli Museum

When it comes to buying tickets for attractions, there are none, anywhere in the world, that I’ve found harder than the Studio Ghibli Museum. And I’ve now had to do it twice!

Tickets are only 1000 yen, which at the moment is just over £5, which is a bargain – but getting hold of them is another matter entirely. If you’re not in Japan, you need to buy them on the Lawson website at a very specific time.

Tickets go on sale once a month for the entire following month, at 10am Japan time on the 10th of the month (which was 1am UK time for us in February, to get tickets for March) and you need to be ready. At 10am, you are put into a queue, and then it’s basically a lottery. Here are some tips for how to get through the process:

• Plan your preferred times and dates in advance. There are 4 time slots for each day – 10am, 12pm, 2pm and 4pm. Note that it’s closed on Tuesdays. Once you’re in, the calendar loads, and you need to be READY to go.
  
• You might be waiting a while. Don’t expect to be in at 1am and done by 1.05am. Our friend got in after 20 minutes, and I was 16,000 people behind him in the queue (yes, sixteen THOUSAND), despite the fact we joined at the same time! My estimated wait time was over an hour, which gave me no chance of getting tickets.
  
• Keep an eye on your wait time. Lots of people will be doing the same thing – we had 3 people in the queue, but obviously as soon as our friend secured tickets, me and Ash dropped out. Our friend’s wait time dropped from 16 minutes to 3 minutes out of nowhere, so the pressure was suddenly ON!
  
• Once your wait time is over, you have ten minutes to proceed.
  
• If there’s a group of you, WAIT until the first person has confirmed tickets before you drop out of the queue. Our friend selected our preferred time and date, got through the first screen and then it told him the tickets were no longer available. Cue absolute PANIC. We managed to get 4pm tickets for the following day.
  
• Have more than one card ready. Our friend’s payment failed!!! I had to scream my credit card details over Discord as he frantically punched in the numbers, and that worked! I have no idea if this is a debit card vs credit card thing (I’ve used that credit card both times as I get zero foreign exchange fees on it).
  
• Prioritise booking this. We bought TeamLab Borderless tickets on the assumption that they would sell out really quickly too, which meant when we lost our preferred time for Ghibli, the best back-up day for us was the day we were visiting Borderless – and we had to choose a time later in the day to accommodate for that. (I found out after that we would have been able to change Borderless, but it worked out well in the end!)
  
• Maybe plan for an afternoon slot in the first place. Unless you’re in within ten minutes of tickets going on sale, you have no chance of getting 10am tickets. Even last time when I didn’t have to wait as long, all the 10am slots had gone for the entire month and I could only get 2pm for our dates. 2pm gives you plenty of time in the museum – 4pm might be a push, as the museum closes at 6, but that also means you have the best chance of getting them at that time!
  
• It might be easier with fewer people – it’s quite possible that we could have got that 12pm slot if there had only been two of us. But at the end of the day, whether you are two or four, that makes little difference in the grand scheme of the number of tickets available.
  
• Overall, this is a really stressful experience. I would only recommend it if you’re a big Studio Ghibli fan, to be honest!

Alternatively you CAN book a tour, which usually includes other stops like the Edo museum, but bear in mind that considering the Ghibli museum only costs about £5, it’s a pretty expensive way of doing it. But if you’ve missed out on tickets and it’s something you really want to do, it’s an option! (Plus the Edo museum does look brilliant, as well.)

Getting to the Ghibli Museum

You’ll read that the Ghibli Museum is in Mitaka, and assume that the nearest station is Mitaka station. In actual fact, it’s pretty much equal distance from Mitaka and Kichijoji, and there were a couple of things I wanted to do in Kichijoji (including the Ghibli-themed restaurant below!) so I’d recommend either arriving or leaving from there instead. To be fair, the themed bus runs from Mitaka and we didn’t actually see that, which would have been quite cool to see!

Corn Barley (or Corn Valley) – a Studio Ghibli themed restaurant!

We also booked a table for the Corn Barley restaurant for after our Studio Ghibli museum visit. This is by the nearest train station, Kichijoji, so it’s perfect to eat in before heading back to Shinjuku.

Corn Barley is a Studio Ghibli themed restaurant, and it’s recommended that you book, especially if you want the set menu of Ghibli-themed food. This was also an absolute mission, which I’ll go into at the end.

First of all – I just have to tell you all about the food! The collectibles! The giant plushies! I LOVED this place so much!

We did the set menu, which is six courses of food, each themed on one of the movies. Honestly as far as cartoon food goes, Ghibli has always managed to make ALL the food in their films look delicious; in fact, they’re so well known for it that there are even recipe books based on Miyazaki’s animated food, so I was very excited to try some real-life versions. These are the courses:

1. Starter salad – My Neighbour Totoro

Starting off basic, we had a “forest salad” which I guess has a loose connection to Totoro as the girls grow a magical forest, and all the Totoros are woodland spirits, so it was very plant-based. This was the least inventive course on the menu, but it was a good, healthy start to the evening.

2. Beef stew – Laputa Castle In The Sky

In Laputa: Castle In The Sky, the girl cooks a wonderful stew for all the sky pirates, and they love it so much that they keep coming back for more. Inkeeping with this, the stew was fantastic!

3. Bacon & eggs – Howl’s Moving Castle

My most anticipated dish – HOW delicious does the bacon & egg breakfast look in Howl’s Moving Castle? Well the restaurant made a PERFECT recreation of it! Complete with Calcifer the sassy fire demon who reluctantly cooks them! This was so, so good. Proper thick bacon too, and those eggs were just spot on. The theming? Perfect.

4. Meatball & veg soup – Laputa Castle In The Sky

Taking it easy for the next course, a hearty soup from Laputa. This was also very good, though perhaps my least favourite out of the lot. There was a lot of soup; it took us a while to get through it all! I think I actually took a break at this point to take some photos around the restaurant! I can’t remember the exact connection but I think it’s what the old man ate?

5. Chicken & pumpkin pie – Kiki’s Delivery Service

Alright so first of all, the pie in Kiki’s Delivery Service is actually a fish pie, cooked by one of Kiki’s customers to be delivered to their niece. I thought chicken & pumpkin was a very unusual choice, but it tasted so good! And it was still shaped like a fish just like the movie. This was one of my favourite dishes and the presentation vs the film was perfect!

Plus we were sat at the Kiki’s Delivery Service themed table, so we were given Jiji headbands to wear!

6. Chocolate soot sprites – My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away

Finally – dessert, in which you could “make your own makkurokurosuke (dust bunnies)”. We were served this plate of chocolate truffles with sprinkles on, with mini bowls of ice cream. There were little separate eyes which we could stick on for the full soot sprite effect! Very cute!

Overall I was really, really impressed with the theming of the place and the dedication that has gone into every detail. Each dish is served with bits and pieces from the film it represents, which I thought was so cool, as well as a sheet of paper explaining what the dish is and where it’s from with a cute illustration. Everything tasted delicious too – I find there can be a compromise on quality in a lot of themed places but this was genuinely one of my favourite meals of the whole trip!

Booking Corn Barley restaurant

You can book Corn Barley here, but be warned – this can be a little stressful! First of all, the website kept resetting the number of people. Every time I selected 4, it would revert back to 2. Anyway, I finally decided to go ahead with it to see what happens, and it worked for 4 people. HOWEVER, it is a process.

First, you have to sign up. It asks for your name twice, but it wouldn’t accept the second one. I thought maybe it needed the second person’s name (at this point I was worried it was only booking for two). It didn’t accept that either, and came up with an error about needing to be katakana. I turned to Google, and it turns out this meant I needed to TRANSLATE my name into Japanese! So I did a wee Google translate, pasted it into the second box, and it worked!

Next, the reservation itself. It confirmed that it was a booking for four, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The relief was short-lived though – I then couldn’t get it to accept a phone number! I tried EVERYTHING. +44, 0011, 0044, all sorts of things. It just kept coming up with an error saying it needed to be a number that works in Japan. So I put in the phone number for our hotel, and the SAME error came up.

Back to Google. Turns out loads of people have this problem with all sorts of Japanese forms. The advice was to put a zero at the start of the Japanese number. It worked!!

Honestly, I don’t know what it is with Japanese booking systems, but this was enough to put me off booking too many things while we were there. (Another reason I didn’t book Pepper Parlor! Have I mentioned that?)

A couple of other Studio Ghibli places to visit in Tokyo

As well as the museum and restaurant, there are a couple of other Ghibli-themed places to visit in Tokyo!

The main one, for me, was Donguri Republic, a chain of stores that specialise in Ghibli merchandise. These are dotted all over Japan, but I highly recommend checking out the Skytree location!

Here you can get a photo with Totoro at the bus stop, as well as a giant Catbus by the door. It’s also full of really cool bits and pieces, though the merch itself is probably no different to what you can find in other stores.

(As an aside, another one worth visiting is in Osaka – I only found out about this afterwards unfortunately, but they have a photo opportunity with No-Face on the train!!)

One popular place for Totoro fans is Shiro Hige’s Cream Puff Factory, a bakery owned by a relative of Miyazaki and therefore the only place licensed to sell actual Ghibli themed food. The main location is in Setagaya which is close to the Gotokuji shrine, but there’s a secondary shop location in Kichijoji which is probably there for the proximity to the Ghibli museum. You can buy Totoro cream puffs – IF you get there early enough! They open at 11am and have usually sold out of them by 2pm. Unfortunately we were unlucky, but we did buy a box of Totoro cookies, which were very cute!

Another place to visit, which we didn’t have time to get to, is the Studio Ghibli mechanical clock. This is a giant steampunk clock at the Nippon TV tower and was actually designed by Hayao Miyazaki so it’s not just a Ghibli-esque feature, but straight from the man himself. It’s a couple of stops down from Tokyo Station, so not *too* out of the way, but it just didn’t quite fit in with our plans, sadly. If you manage to go, aim to visit just before noon, 3pm, 6pm or 8pm, as the clock springs into action to some music. There’s also an extra “show” at 10am at weekends.

It goes without saying that Japan is an incredible place for any Studio Ghibli fan, especially now that there’s the new Ghibli Park in Nagoya (we didn’t get to visit this but the final areas actually opened just before we were in Japan so I wish we had booked it!). It’s great that there are so many accessible Ghibli things to do in Tokyo; I really enjoyed the museum, and everything else we saw and did was brilliant.

Are you a Studio Ghibli fan? Let me know your favourite film(s) in the comments!

Read more about our trip to Japan!
⭐ Five Days In The Bright Lights Of Tokyo
⭐ My Top 10 Highlights Of Our Trip To Japan
⭐ Our Perfect Two Week Itinerary For A First Time Visit To Japan
⭐ Shrines, Temples & Geisha: How To Spend Two Days In Magical Kyoto, Japan
⭐ A Love Letter To Osaka, Japan: Why It’s Worth More Than A Day Trip
⭐ Making The Most Of Universal Studios & Super Nintendo World In Japan
⭐ A Photo Guide To TeamLab Borderless