teamLab Planets TOKYO DMM, Toyosu

The name and the place

The full name is teamLab Planets TOKYO DMM, and it sits at Toyosu 6-1-16 in Koto City, on reclaimed land beside Tokyo Bay. The DMM in the title is the company that co-produces it, which is why searches for "teamLab Planets TOKYO DMM" and for "teamLab Planets" land on the same building.

It opened on 7 July 2018. The relationship with teamLab Borderless confuses almost everyone: same collective, two entirely separate museums, about 9 km apart. Borderless is at Azabudai Hills in central Minato City and is permanent. Planets is out at Toyosu and has a published end date.

The short version of what makes Planets different: at Borderless the art is around you. At Planets you are standing in it, barefoot, in water.

Immersion, taken literally

The museum describes itself as a place where you "become one with the art" using your entire body, and unlike most such claims this one has physical consequences you need to plan for.

You take off your shoes at the locker area. You take off socks or stockings too, because several works involve water. In those rooms the water rises to knee height even on an adult - it is chlorinated with sodium hypochlorite to regulated levels, and the museum is explicit that it is not a swimming pool.

Unlike Borderless, Planets has a fixed route through clearly delineated spaces. You walk it in order. That makes it far more predictable to plan around, and it is the reason a visit here compresses into a couple of hours where a Borderless visit stretches.

Entrance Pass prices

The Entrance Pass carries a fixed admission time and is priced dynamically, tax included:

- Adults 18 and over: JPY 3,600 - Junior and senior high school students: JPY 2,800 - Children 4 to 12: JPY 1,500 - Children 3 and under: free - Holders of a disability certificate: JPY 1,800

ID is checked. Bring a passport or ID card, and expect to prove age or school affiliation if you booked a student rate.

The Premium Pass, and whether it is worth JPY 12,000

The Premium Pass costs JPY 12,000 for anyone aged 4 and over. It removes the fixed entry time and gives priority entry.

That is more than three times the adult Entrance Pass, and what it buys is not more art - it is not queueing. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on your date. It is the only product either teamLab museum sells that addresses the complaint reviewers raise most: one traveller from Australia, writing in August 2026, described the entry queue as "very loooong" and said that on a hot, cold or rainy day it tests your physical and mental endurance before the art gets its chance.

For a weekday in a quiet month, save the money. For a Saturday in cherry blossom season or Golden Week, it is the difference between an hour outside and walking in.

The 30-minute entry rule

This is the single most expensive detail on the page. On the platform ticket, entry is only possible within the first 30 minutes after your selected entry time, and there are no refunds for late arrival.

The entry windows are 08:00-12:00, 12:30-16:00, 16:30-18:30, 19:00-20:00 and 20:30. Same-day tickets are not sold on this listing, so this cannot be a plan you make over breakfast.

There is one softening detail, and it comes from the museum rather than the platform: teamLab's own FAQ says that if you arrive later on the same day within opening hours, you can still enter - ask a member of staff at the venue. Treat that as the museum's goodwill, not as a refund policy you can rely on.

Changes, refunds and resale

Tickets cannot be cancelled or refunded once purchased. Bought on the museum's own website, a ticket's date and time can be changed up to two hours before the admission time; bought anywhere else, the seller's terms apply.

Resale is banned outright. A ticket bought through a resale channel will not get you in, and the museum states plainly that it takes no responsibility for anyone turned away with one. If a resale price looks better than the museum's, that is why.

And the rule that applies to both teamLab museums: re-entry is not permitted, and no refund is given once you have entered.

What comes off, and how deep it gets

Shoes come off at the locker area. Socks and stockings come off too - the water works are entered with bare feet, and there is no way around it.

Water levels rise to knee height even for adults. Not ankle-deep, not a decorative film across a floor: knee height. The museum chlorinates it with sodium hypochlorite to regulated standards and states it is not for swimming.

So: trousers that roll above the knee, shorts, or a skirt above the knee. Skinny jeans do not roll and you will be wading in them. Lockers are provided for small items.

The wet-clothes rule

Here is the part visitors discover too late. Wet clothes are not allowed into the next artwork. For safety reasons, staff will stop you and ask you to change.

If you have nothing to change into, towels can be rented and you dry off - which means standing in a corridor drying yourself while the visit waits. Bring a spare set for small children, or dress them in something nobody minds getting wet. The museum says exactly this in its own notes.

This is also the strongest practical argument for choosing an early or late slot in cold weather: you walk out of a heated building into a Tokyo February evening with damp legs either way, but at 20:30 you are heading straight home.

Mirrored floors and the free shorts nobody mentions

Several rooms have mirrored floors. The museum lends shorts for free, in sizes XS to 6L, along with wraps, precisely for this, and you return them on the way out. If you are in a skirt or a dress, this is the answer, it costs nothing, and it is not offered automatically - you have to ask a member of staff.

Footwear matters too, in the parts where shoes are back on: some artworks cannot be experienced in heels or in sandals without heel support, and free rental shoes are available.

Two more things the museum flags: one area has strong stimulating light, and another is genuinely dark. If either is a problem for anyone in your group, staff can route you around individual works.

Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People - Infinity

The one that put this museum on every feed. Koi swim across the surface of the water you are standing in, their movement shaped by where people are and by each other. When a koi collides with a person it bursts into flowers and scatters.

The trajectories the fish leave behind draw lines on the water, so the room is a slowly accumulating drawing that you are inside of. The flowers change with the seasons, which means the room in April is not the room in November.

This is the work that makes the barefoot rule non-negotiable, and it is the reason people come.

Floating Flower Garden

A space filled completely with living orchids - not projections. They hang in a three-dimensional mass, and as you approach, the flowers above you rise, opening a pocket of air so you can move. Walk towards another visitor and your two pockets merge into one space.

The orchids grow without soil, absorbing water from the air, which is how they survive suspended in a room. teamLab's own note on the work is a small essay on why orchids evolved to live on rocks and trees rather than compete for soil - roughly a tenth of all plant species are orchids, precisely because of that adaptation.

The rest of the route

Waterfall of Light Particles at the Top of an Incline sends light down a slope you climb, based on an earlier work made on a real waterfall in the mountains of Shikoku. Light reflects only off the particles, so the falling water becomes a falling curtain of light that leaves afterimages in the dark.

The moss garden works are built around a genuinely strange fact: mosses are poikilohydric, meaning they do not die when they dry out - they shut down and revive when wet. The tardigrades living in the moss do the same thing, entering a state called cryptobiosis where they are neither living nor dead.

There is also a colour work using Kasane no Irome, the layered silk colours of pre-modern Japan, rendered as twelve shades of light, and an Open-Air section outdoors. That last one stays open in light rain but closes in typhoon winds or heavy rain; the rest of the museum carries on regardless.

Ninety minutes to two hours, and why

Plan on 90 minutes to two hours inside. There is no time limit once you are admitted - the museum does not push you out before the next admission slot - but the route is fixed and finite, which caps the natural length of a visit in a way that Borderless does not.

Add time on either side: the locker area at the start, drying off if you got wetter than planned, and the shop on the way out. If you want to eat at Vegan Ramen UZU inside, add another 45 minutes.

The one thing that stretches a visit unpredictably is the entry queue, which is outside your ticket time and outside your control unless you hold a Premium Pass.

When it is quietest

The museum opens at 8:00, earlier than almost anything else in Tokyo, and the first window is the calmest of the day. The 20:30 slot is the other quiet one - the museum runs to 22:00, so a late entry gives you a thinly populated hour and a half.

At busy times, staff will move visitors along if they have settled in one room for a long stretch. This is stated policy rather than an occasional annoyance, and it is worth knowing if your plan was to sit in the koi room for forty minutes.

The reviews back the timing up: several travellers who booked the 16:30-18:30 window describe taking their time and not feeling rushed.

Opening hours

The museum runs 8:00 to 22:00, with last entry one hour before closing. That makes it one of the longest-open attractions in Tokyo and easy to slot into a day that already has something else in it.

In 2026 it is closed on Thursday 3 September and Thursday 1 October. Those are irregular one-off closures rather than a weekly pattern, so check your date.

The Living Art Store and Sketch Factory run 8:30 to 22:00 - half an hour behind the museum opening, an hour and a half past its last entry.

Vegan Ramen UZU and the Glass House

Vegan Ramen UZU, the Glass House and the Emptiness Table run 10:30 to 21:30. Only light meals and drinks are served between 10:30 and 11:00, and last orders for ramen are 30 minutes before closing.

The catch: these are reachable only after you have been admitted to the museum, and you cannot enter the restaurant before the admission time printed on your ticket. So the plan of eating first and going in afterwards does not work - it is the other way round.

Given that re-entry is not permitted, that makes the meal a decision you take on the way through rather than a break you come back from.

By train and taxi

The museum is at Toyosu 6-1-16, Koto-ku, one minute on foot from the north exit of Shin-Toyosu Station on the Yurikamome Line. It is five minutes from Shijomae Station and Toyosu Market, and ten minutes from Exit 7 of Toyosu Station on the Yurakucho Line.

By taxi it is roughly ten minutes from Ginza and fifteen from Tokyo Station. From Haneda Airport it is about fifteen minutes by expressway.

For perspective, this is the museum's real weakness against Borderless, which sits two minutes from a Hibiya Line exit in central Minato City. One August 2026 reviewer put it directly: Planets is very far from the middle of Tokyo, roughly an hour, and Borderless is much more convenient. They still called the experience awesome and worth the hassle.

The bus to avoid, and the parking perk

The museum currently flags heavy congestion on the To-05-2 Toei bus running from Tokyo Station, Ginza and Tsukiji towards Shin-Toyosu. If a journey planner offers you that bus, take the Yurikamome instead.

If you drive, there is a small weekday perk: show a same-day Planets ticket at Urban Dock LaLaport TOYOSU - the 3F Card Desk or the 1F general information centre - and you get one hour of free parking. The Toyosu Bayside Cross Tower lot is excluded, and the parking ticket is stamped on entry and valid only on the day.

What people consistently praise

The recurring note across recent reviews is that it does not feel like a museum. A traveller from the United Kingdom, writing in August 2026, described the combination of digital art, water, mirrors, lights and nature as something completely unlike a typical attraction, and singled out being genuinely part of the artwork rather than looking at it.

The water works and the flower garden get named more than anything else. Families report it working across a wide age range - one visitor from the United States brought teenagers and reported the adults enjoying it as much.

And repeatedly: people say they did not feel rushed, which is a direct consequence of the no-time-limit policy.

What the criticism is actually about

Almost none of it is about the art. Two things come up.

The first is the queue, which is the Premium Pass's entire reason for existing and which is worst in bad weather because you are outside for it. The second is distance - Toyosu is a long way from where most visitors are staying, and there is no getting around the geography.

A third, quieter one is the wet-clothes surprise: people who arrived in the wrong trousers spend part of the visit managing that instead of looking at anything. That is fixable for free, before you leave your hotel, by reading the clothing section.

If you have one afternoon and want the highest chance of a good time, this is still the more predictable of the two teamLab museums - a fixed route, a known length, and the works that made you search in the first place.

The four differences

Shoes. Off at Planets, on at Borderless. That single fact drives everything else about how the two visits feel.

Route. Planets has a fixed path through separate rooms; Borderless has no map, no route, and works that move between rooms while you watch.

Location. Planets is in Toyosu on the Yurikamome Line; Borderless is two minutes from Kamiyacho in central Minato City, connected underground.

Time horizon. Planets closes at the end of 2027; Borderless is permanent.

If the photographs that brought you here had water in them, they were taken here. If your group includes anyone for whom bare feet on wet mirrored floors is a problem, book Borderless.

Doing both

It works, but not lazily. Kamiyacho to Shin-Toyosu runs about 35 minutes, and each museum wants two to three hours if you are not rushing.

The order that works is Borderless first, in the morning - it opens at 8:30 and its rooms are calmest early - then Planets later, since it runs to 22:00 and the light outside stops mattering once you are inside. That way, if your clothes end up damp, you are going home rather than to a second museum.

Separate days is better still. Neither museum permits re-entry, so a rushed lap is one you cannot repeat. Both are compared side by side on the digital art museum tickets and tours page.

The dates, in order

teamLab Planets TOKYO opened on 7 July 2018 with a planned run to the end of 2022. That was extended to the end of 2023. It was then extended again, to the end of 2027, which is the date printed on the museum's venue page today.

So the honest reading is: the museum has a stated closing date, it is not imminent, and the precedent is that these dates move. No fourth extension has been announced.

Practically - if you are travelling to Tokyo before the end of 2027, there is no urgency and no reason to pay more for a slot than you need to. If you are planning for 2028, do not build the trip around it until teamLab says something. Borderless has no end date at all and is the safer bet for a distant plan.

Mobility and health

The GetYourGuide listing states plainly that the experience is not suitable for wheelchair users, nor for people with heart problems or people with epilepsy. The epilepsy warning is concrete: one area of the museum uses strong stimulating light, and another is dark.

The museum's own notes are gentler. They describe detour routes that staff will arrange for visitors with disabilities, or for anyone travelling with children, who wants to skip a particular artwork.

Both can be true at once - a detour exists, but barefoot passage through water across mirrored floors is not level access. If mobility is a factor for anyone in your group, Borderless is the museum built for it: wheelchair loan, accessible escalator, and staff support, with a cap on how many wheelchairs are admitted at a time.

Pregnancy and children

For safety reasons, pregnant visitors are not permitted in some areas. Staff route you around them.

One accompanying adult is required for every three children, counting the under-4s who enter free. The booking listing adds that children under 13 must be accompanied, and unaccompanied minors are not admitted at all.

Infants can come in a front baby carrier. There are diaper tables in the restrooms and a first-aid room available for feeding or resting - a provision Borderless does not have, since it has two rest areas and no nursing room. The museum's advice for small children is the practical one: clothes you do not mind getting wet, or a change of clothes in the bag.