My prior knowledge of the Ghibli Museum was only that it had to do with the movies Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. I’m not even sure if I actually ever watched Totoro or just bought a lot of Totoro things when I was a little kid and I’m still not exactly sure what a Totoro is. But someone told us about the Ghibli Museum on our first trip to Japan when we brought the kids (they were about 4 years old) and we finally got a chance to visit the famed museum this year. And even without knowing a lot about the movies and without understanding a lot of Japanese, our whole family had a good time in this whimsical museum. So if you are thinking of going to the Ghibli Museum and don’t know what you are getting into, here are a few things you might want to know before you go. And make sure you read the “about page” on the Ghibli Museum website too-after I read it, I knew that this was a place I had to see for myself in real life.
Buy your tickets to the Ghibli Museum at least three months before you go on your trip to Japan
While you plan your trip to Japan check out the Ghibli Museum website to get an idea of when tickets go on sale. The site is very slow and there are three official ways to get tickets-you can buy them through the site in advance, you can try with JTB ahead of time and you can try at Lawson stores when you are in Japan. We have tried to buy them through a Lawson store in Tokyo before to no avail.
This trip we were lucky enough to book our plane tickets to Japan around the same time the ticketing period opened up on the Ghibli Museum Site so we ended up finding tickets to Ghibli because of sheer coincidence. We rarely plan our activities this far ahead, but for places like Japan, Italy and Washington DC where big attractions book way ahead of time we are finding that pre-planning is becoming more and more essential if there is a must-see site in our travel plans. (FYI we also needed to plan our booking ahead of time for the Toyota Factory in Nagoya Japan and the Cup Noodles Museum in Yokohama too.)
Show up to the Ghibli Museum exactly at your booking time
I’ve been to many ticketed events in the United States where if you show up early or late for your booking time things end up okay and they let you in no problem. I was really worried about not making it to the Ghibli Museum on time after trying so many times to get there so we arrived a couple hours early and I thought maybe we could eat at the cafe there while we waited. We tried to enter early and were told to come back later. The cafe at Ghibli Museum is also off-limits until your ticketed time-I asked in both English and Japanese if it was okay to eat at the cafe while we waited and was told “no” by two gate attendants. (So if you are planning on eating at the cafe, you might want to choose an earlier entry time so that you can make sure you have enough time to eat in the cafe.)
What to do nearby the Ghibli Museum while you wait for your ticketed time
While you wait you can take pictures of the outside of the building. Inokoshira Park nearby is really beautiful and it has a playground for the kids. We always bring something the kids can throw like a ball when we travel so the hubby and kids played ball for a while. I facetimed my grandpa to show him the cherry blossoms that were blooming while we there.
We walked by a bird cafe called the “Kotori Cafe” that I thought might be fun if we weren’t already stuffed from the pancake cafe we ate at on our way to the museum but buying something to share here wasn’t an option. At the Kotori cafe each person must buy something in order to sit in this cafe and it is a small cafe so it has the potential to get full quickly. The food here looks adorable though and if I had known about it, I might have timed this with our Ghibli Museum day.
Kichijoji city is a fun place to stop nearby the Ghibli Museum
We stopped in Kichijoji city on our way to the Ghibli Museum. There are lots of cool shops in the area and this is where I read that there was a brand of a Japanese Soufflé Pancake restaurant I wanted to visit. The pancake restaurants in the more touristy areas of Tokyo were really busy but this one had no line up and we were able to sit for a while and enjoy our meal. The home shop attached to this pancake restaurant was really cool too. We were there on some kind of area holiday so many things were closed but on another day I would have loved to stay and shop and hang out in this area a while.
What to expect at the Ghibli Museum
You can’t take pictures inside the Ghibli Museum so I don’t want to give too much away. And not being distracted by taking pictures helped make it easy to spend time with the kids and take in the whimsy and magic of it all. The visit will probably take about an hour and a half or two hours depending on how in depth you want your visit to be. We even spent a little bit of time in the gift store.
You are allowed to take pictures in the outside areas and the museum is such an adorable building. I was a little sad that there was a big lineup at the cafe though and we did not want to wait. Our favorite part of the museum was a little fountain that the kids used to pump water into a bucket to create a stream that flowed into a cartoon character shaped drain. We also watched a movie in a beautiful theatre and even though it was in Japanese we still understood the ideas in it and had a wonderful time. I don’t know if this is the type of place we would revisit but we had a really fun day and it was a cool adventure to get tickets and see what the Ghibli Museum was all about.
Our day trip to the Ghibli Museum was part of a 10 day family trip to Japan that included Okinawa and Shikoku. Our home base in Tokyo while we visited the Ghibli Museum was the Tokyo Station Hotel (which was very convenient for train travel.). If you are planning on going to Japan for the first time with kids, I also have a post about how I research and plan our trips.
PS. there are now quite a few direct flights to Tokyo from Seattle. We often book our flights through Expedia.
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)
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