Embark on a magical journey to the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, as we share our family’s enchanting experience and guide you through the crucial process of securing Ghibli Museum tickets. Our visit, fueled by our love for Studio Ghibli’s anime masterpieces, led us to explore this captivating museum, conceived by the iconic Hayao Miyazaki.

This article is your comprehensive guide to purchasing tickets, offering insights into various buying options, from direct online purchase to assistance through personal shoppers. This article also contains our very detailed guide on Ghibli Museum, including practical information such as how to get there and opening hours.

Disclaimer:  This article contains affiliate links.  If you book after clicking on one of these links then we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Studio Ghibli Museum Tickets

Ghibli Museum tickets can be incredibly difficult to get. You cannot simply visit the museum and buy a ticket on the day. You have to book Ghibli Museum tickets in advance. There is also a very high demand for tickets, and only a limited number of tickets are made available for sale each day.

The limited number of tickets is partly due to the relatively small size of the museum. Also, only a certain number of people are allowed inside the museum every two hours to keep it from becoming too crowded. There are various options for how to buy Ghibli Museum tickets. In this article, we provide several methods to buy tickets as follows:

• Ghibli Museum Tickets go on sale at 10am Japan time on 10th of each month for the following month.  (eg. 10th January for visits in February). You can join the scrum with thousands of other people and try to book your Ghibli tickets using this option.
• Get assistance from a personal shopper on Fiverr. Our recommended Fiverr personal shopper to purchase Ghibli Museum tickets is Sean.
• Book a Ghibli Museum tour through either Klook , Viator or KKDay.

Note that Ghibli Museum tickets cannot be resold, as you have to provide your passport information when you book, and they also check your passport when you enter the museum.

Buy Studio Ghibli Museum Tickets Direct

Most people who successfully get tickets by booking directly also experience a fairly high degree of stress while trying to book. You can consider yourself fortunate if the ticket booking process goes smoothly. Here are quotes from some of our Japan Travel Planning Facebook Group members about their experiences:

• “Managed to book tickets. what an awful, stressful website.”
• “Open a ton of windows and hope one (or some) of them go through. The system will kick you out a million times, but don’t give up!!! Keep opening those tabs!”
• “I’ve finally bought tickets for the studio Ghibli museum! This has been nothing but agony! I’ve been refreshing for one hour. I had to restart the session all over again. What a disaster!”
• “I got mine last month and it was a traumatising experience 😂 Took 90 minutes of crashing, especially sucks when you get all the way to the last page of details and it goes down.”
• “I was at work surreptitiously trying to buy tickets, and my wife and the kids were at home on three different computers. They finally got through in a little under an hour.”
• “It was a long night trying to get those tickets from two different browsers and my phone refreshing and reloading for 80 minutes.”
• “In the UK I had to get up at 2 am to be online to secure my August tickets. It took 90 mins of countless and frustrating crashing and reinputting of details but I got 5 tickets in the end (only at 4 pm though which was not my preference).”

Our Experience Visiting the Ghibli Museum

In the year leading up to our most recent visit to Japan, my family (particularly my youngest son and I) fell in love with the movies of Studio Ghibli. The first Ghibli movie we ever watched was My Neighbour Totoro, and we instantly fell for the beauty, wonder and whimsy of Studio Ghibli.

We then went on to watch many more Ghibli movies, including Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso, and Grave of the Fireflies. Our two favourites at the moment would be My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, while the most confronting of the movies we watched was definitely Grave of the Fireflies.

If you or your family love Ghibli movies or are interested in the craft of traditionally animated movies, Ghibli Museum has to be on your list of must-dos when visiting Japan.

About Studio Ghibli

Studio Ghibli is a much-loved Japanese anime house. Founded in 1985, there are six Ghibli movies among the ten highest-grossing anime films made in Japan. Spirited Away (2001), in particular, was massively popular, having grossed US $360 million worldwide. Eighteen years later, Spirited Away is still the highest-grossing movie at the Japanese box office and remains one of the ten highest-grossing traditionally animated (non-computer animated) movies worldwide.

The man behind many of Studio Ghibli’s movies was Hayao Miyazaki, who also designed the Ghibli Museum. Miyazaki has been described as the Walt Disney of Japan, but while many of his films are geared toward younger audiences, there is far more depth and complexity to his movies.

How We Purchased Our Ghibli Museum Tickets

At the time we visited, several online travel agencies had the option to purchase your Ghibli Museum tickets, so we took the easy option to book through one of these providers, bypassing the need to join the scrum to book direct. Through a third party, the tickets were more expensive, but we considered the time and stress we saved to be worth it. Our tickets were delivered to our hotel in Tookyo and were at the reception desk when we checked in, making it a very easy process.

Post COVID-19 these third-party ticket options are no longer available, so your only options to purchase your tickets are as detailed above in this article.

Arriving at the Ghibli Museum

We started our visit by catching the JR Chuo Line train to Kichijoji Station, to the west of Tokyo. From there we decided to walk through Inokashira Park before entering the gates of Ghibli Museum. We were soon greeted by a massive ticket-selling Totoro in a reception window. After watching My Neighbour Totoro, this was a fantastic start to our Ghibli Museum visit.

As we moved closer to Totoro’s reception window, we noticed the soot sprites (also known as dust bunnies) peeking out from the base of the reception window. This was an early taste of all the little details that made visiting the museum a joy.

We then continued walking until we rounded a small hill to the main entrance of Ghibli Museum. The building is slightly reminiscent of Hobbiton with its vegetation-covered building, circular windows and curved edges. Ghibli Museum blends in beautifully with its natural surroundings.

We entered the Ghibli Museum building through a set of double doors featuring intricate and colourful stained glass door panels.

The panel on the right features Totoro.

Taking photos is not permitted inside the Ghibli museum. I was initially quite confronted by the idea that I couldn’t take photos in the Ghibli Museum, which is also why this article doesn’t contain photos from inside the museum. However, I very soon found it quite liberating not to feel the need to take photos, and I was able to relax and immerse myself in the experience. Ghibli Museum wants visitors to experience the museum space with their own eyes and senses rather than through a camera’s viewfinder.

Because you are unable to take photos when inside the museum, I would recommend buying the Ghibli Museum souvenir guide, which is full of photos and information that will help you remember your experience when you go back home. You are, however free to take photos in the outdoor spaces of Ghibli Musem.

When we entered the main reception area, our eyes were drawn up to the brightly coloured ceiling frescoes. In the reception area, we exchanged our ticket vouchers for Ghibli Musem tickets which contained a three-frame strip of 35mm film depicting a scene from a Ghibli movie. Check out the parallels between the stained glass door panel in the picture above and the film strip below. When the light shines through both, they have a very similar effect. There is wonderful stained glass imagery throughout the museum.

Each of our five tickets contained a different movie scene, and we definitely held on to these tickets as they made a great souvenir.

After passing through the reception area, we descended a set of stairs and emerged into the Central Hall in the basement of the museum. We soon discovered that the Museum was so much more than a building that housed a series of exhibits. The entire museum was an exhibit in itself.

The central hall is a huge, airy space with a soaring stained glass ceiling dome decorated with scenes from Ponyo and a massive ceiling fan revolving overhead. The hall has what I would describe as a steampunk aesthetic featuring plenty of wood, copper and wrought ironwork. It felt very much like being part of a Ghibli movie such as Howl’s Moving Castle.

There was a lot to take in, including bridged passages overhead, tightly spiralling staircases and more traditional staircases, an exposed lift shaft featuring plenty of wrought iron and large wooden doors leading everywhere. Our two boys, in particular, just wanted to explore and kept on asking us to climb up the spiral staircase. It wasn’t possible to go up and down the staircase as it was too narrow and the turns were too tight.

As you wander through the museum, watch for surprise spaces and whimsical details on even normally simple features such as door handles and tap heads. One of my favourite museum elements was the incredible clockwork mechanisms, such as the copper clockwork fish near the animator’s rooms (Where a Film is Born).

Ghibli Museum Basement

The basement area contains a permanent exhibit room called “The Beginning of Movement”, and a screening room called the Saturn Theatre.

The Beginning of Movement Room focuses on the history of animation and features the work of Studio Ghibli and other animators. The room showcases some fascinating early animation technologies. Just some of the displays are panorama boxes featuring layered scenes from various animes, a projector in a large glass case showing the history of evolution at different points in the projector and two zoetropes.

The most fascinating exhibit was the large Totoro zoetrope at the back of the room. This zoetrope consists of 347 static figures in slightly different positions mounted on a spinning platform. The figures include Totoro, the Cat Bus, and bat wings, as well as Mei and Satsuki. The zoetrope project took almost a year to complete, and it is a true work of art. As the zoetrope platform started to spin and the strobe lights flashed, we were mesmerised as the static scene was transformed.

Suddenly we could see a running Cat Bus, the girls skipping ropes and riding unicycles, flying bats, Totoro about to take flight with his umbrella, and a smaller bouncing Totoro. Taking our eyes off this zoetrope and moving on to the next exhibit was hard. We revisited the room a second time during our visit to check out this zoetrope again.

Also in the basement was the Saturn Theatre which can fit about 80-100 people. The theatre plays 10 original animated short films which rotate throughout the year monthly and can only be seen at the Ghibli Museum. The short films range in length from 8 minutes up to 16 minutes. When we entered the theatre, we first noticed the brightly coloured fresco which took up the whole ceiling and featured a bright blue sky, fluffy clouds, planes, birds and a large bright yellow sun and moon.

We then settled down to watch the short film titled Koro’s Big Day Out. Koro is an incredibly kawaii little puppy who chases his owner, who is leaving to go to school and becomes lost. Koro experiences a whole series of misadventures, including almost being run over by a car, running under a moving train, being threatened by a cranky cat, and encountering a giant bullfrog. When his owner gets home from school, she frantically looks for Koro with the help of her father. Rest assured that the story has a happy ending. While the movie was in Japanese, it didn’t detract from our enjoyment of the short film, and it was one of the main highlights of our visit to the Ghibli Museum.

Ghibli Museum First Floor

On the museum’s first floor is a second permanent exhibit room called “Where a Film is Born”, along with a temporary special exhibition room which changes every year. When we visited the museum, the current exhibition was titled “Painting the Colors of Our Films”. Also on the second floor is the Ghibli Museum Cafe on a large external deck area.

The “Where a Film is Born” permanent exhibit consists of five smaller rooms. The first room is a preproduction room, also known as ‘A Boy’s Room’, which takes you on a journey back to the mid-20th Century. The premise behind the room is that it’s a gift from the boy’s grandpa. The walls are filled with illustrations and sketches. The shelves are filled with books, and there are various toys throughout the room. Suspended from the ceiling are a pteranodon and a plane. The room is literally filled with inspiration for a young animator.

Another room is called “A Place Where the World is Made”. It focuses on the process of making background art, and the walls are filled with vividly coloured background scenes. Another room called “A Place Where Stories are Told” looks at the staging process and is gloriously cluttered with piles of books everywhere.

Another room looks at how ink and paint are used to bring colour to animations, and the “Animation Room” takes a closer look at key animation and the in-between drawings created. After wandering through the five rooms, you will get a great insight into the process of traditional animation. There are so many small details to enjoy in each room that you could easily revisit them two or three times and still discover something new.

The special exhibition focused on the process of bringing colour to Ghibli films. The images on display show how lighting and colour choices can be used to show changes in weather and time. The images contain details such as colour codes to depict morning, noon and night. The displays also show how colours can express details like the texture and feel of materials, moods and emotions.

The previous exhibition from May 2017 to November 2018 showcased the importance of food and meals in Ghibli movies. It explored the depth and richness of food scenes and showed how food could be drawn to appear even more delectable than the real thing. More details on the special exhibitions can be found on the Ghibli Museum website.

Ghibli Cafe

The Ghibli Cafe is also located on an external decked area on the museum’s first floor. The name of the Ghibli Museum Cafe is the Straw Hat Cafe. I would strongly recommend visiting the cafe to enjoy the whole experience of the Ghibli Museum, but just like the gift shop, the Ghibli cafe can get extremely crowded.

It’s not unusual to experience very long waits to get into the Ghibli Museum Cafe. I have read stories online where people have waited up to three hours to get into the cafe, with wait times of 90 minutes not unusual. For such long wait times, people have to initially queue standing up before going into a covered waiting area with chairs where you at least have a chance to read a book and browse the menu.

We were not prepared to wait this long to get into the cafe. Our strategy to avoid the crowds in both places was to first book our tickets for the 10 am slot, and then we made sure we arrived at the Ghibli Museum in advance of the 10 am opening time. After a quick look at the ground floor of the Museum, one of us took our children to the gift shop while the other went to line up for the cafe to wait for it to open.

The cafe opened at 11 am, and my wife joined the cafe queue at 10:20 am but was still not the first in line.

After our three children and I ran amok buying half the items in the shop (a slight exaggeration), we joined my wife in the queue. The wait was quite pleasant as the weather was great, and we happily chatted to some other people in the queue before being given copies of the menu. Here is a composite image of the Ghibli Cafe Menu during our visit.

The menu is simple, and the range is quite limited, but almost everything comes from organic farms and is fresh and tasty.

From the ‘Something to Eat’ section of the menu, we tried the fresh pasta with char-grilled chicken in cheese and garlic cream sauce, the pork cutlet curry with multi-grain rice, the pistou soup with shiso walnut pesto and the whole-grain bread rolls. The food was nicely presented, fresh and extremely tasty. We also really enjoyed the Ghibli-themed plateware.

We chose a hot tea, pilot’s lemonade, a blue sky ice-cream soda, and homemade ginger ale to drink. The cold drinks were nothing particularly special but were very refreshing. My daughter noticed that the ginger ale was not very sweet and had a strong ginger taste but it was still enjoyable.

We sampled everything on the dessert menu, and everything was insanely good. Between us, we tried a strawberry shortcake with berries, straw hat’s parfait, chocolate and apricot jam layered cake, crispy-crunchy-creamy cheese pie, and custard ice cream.

In addition to the Ghibli Cafe, there’s a Hot Dog and ice cream stand just around the corner from the cafe. If you can’t cope with the idea of queuing a long time for the cafe or getting the munchies while waiting in line, I would suggest grabbing some food from the takeout stand.

We didn’t get a chance to try everything on the menu but have read that the ice cream is excellent, and I definitely liked the idea of trying some orange ice cream. The spicy curry soup with sausages and vegetables also sounded great. If you check out the takeout menu below, you will notice that you can also sample a Ghibli-branded organic craft beer while at the Ghibli Museum.

Ghibli Museum Second Floor

On the museum’s second floor, you will find the Studio Ghibli store called Mamma Aiuto, the reading room “Tri-Hawks”, and the Cat Bus room.

The cat bus room is nothing short of fantastic. Imagine a gigantic plushie/stuffed toy with massive eyes and a huge Cheshire cat grin to get a mental image of the cat bus. It’s incredibly soft and tactile, and it’s probably 5 metres long, 3-4 metres wide and about 1.5 metres high.

Then imagine you can touch the Cat Bus and clamber all over and through it. Unfortunately, it can only be played with by children 12 and under, which is a great shame as the inner child in me desperately wanted to go touch and sit inside the Cat Bus. Because of the age restrictions, only my youngest son got to enjoy playing on the Cat Bus.

Also on the same floor is the Tri-Hawks reading room. The room is like a small library with shelves full of books recommended by Hayao Miyazaki and the Museum, which children can browse freely. The two issues with this room for us were that almost all the books seemed to be in Japanese, and that even if we could read the book, there weren’t many places to sit, relax, and enjoy reading a book. It felt more like a bookstore than a library or reading room.

Studio Ghibli Store

The museum shop, Mamma Aiuto, is named after the Sky Pirates from Porco Rosso. The shop contains favourite character products that can readily be purchased from shops like Donguri Kyowakoku, a chain of dedicated Ghibli stores located across Japan. However, the Ghibli Museum shop also has items unique to the Museum. Prior to our visit, we hadn’t visited any other stores that sold Ghibli merchandise so we bought all our Ghibli merch at the museum.

When we entered the Studio Ghibli shop, my kids and I were literally like kids let loose in a candy shop. Just like the rest of the Museum, the Ghibli Museum gift shop has a beautiful warmth thanks to the extensive use of wood and great lighting. The product displays are artfully presented to entice you to buy.

In the space of 5-10 minutes, we had filled a couple of baskets before adult rationality set in, and we narrowed down the items we would buy. In the end, we narrowed down our purchases to several plushies, some Ghibli playing cards and the fantastic Ghibli souvenir guidebook pack. If nothing else, get the Ghibli Museum Souvenir Guide which also comes with a Museum Design Brochure to help you remember your visit to the Ghibli Museum.

We probably spent a couple hundred dollars but could have spent much more. For example, I would have loved to buy a couple of hand-painted scenes from Studio Ghibli films.

Rooftop Garden

From the terrace just the Cat Bus Room, we climbed another spiral stairway which leads to the grassy rooftop garden.

In the garden, we found the guardian of the Ghibli Museum, the iconic five-meter-tall Robot Soldier from “Castle in the Sky” who looks down over Inokashira Park. There was a bit of a queue, but we couldn’t leave the Ghibli Museum without getting a photo with the Robot Soldier.

Also, before leaving, check out the patio area, which is a lush and green space full of handcrafted ornaments and designs, a pile of firewood, and a working water pump.

Museum Hours

Ghibli Museum is open from Wednesday to Monday, including weekends. The museum is open from 10 am to 6 pm.

The Ghibli Museum also has regular closures for specific dates, some public holidays and maintenance. Ensure you check the museum website for the latest opening dates and times details.

Museum Directions – How to get to the Ghibli Museum

The address for Studio Ghibli Museum is 1-1-83 Shimorenjaku, Mitaka-shi, Tokyo 181-0013. Ghibli Museum is almost equidistant between Kichijoji Station and Mitaka Station, which are both on the Chuo line, so it doesn’t matter if you get off at either station.

We caught the train to Kichijoji Station and then walked through Inokashira Park to get to the Ghibli Museum. From Tokyo Station, it takes about 30 minutes to get from Tokyo Station to Kichijoji Station on the Chuo Line. If you are staying in the Shinjuku area, you could catch the same Chuo line to Kichijoji Station, and the journey time would be about 15 minutes.

If you have the time and the weather is good, I would strongly recommend walking through Inokashira Park, as it’s a beautiful park and doesn’t add much to the total journey time. It’s about 200-300 metres from Kichijoji Station’s South Gate (Park Exit) to get to Inokashira Park, then a further 1km walk to the Ghibli Museum through Inokashira Park.

There are plenty of signs to direct you to the Ghibli Musem, so it’s very hard to get lost. The signage also helped build anticipation and raised excitement levels as we drew closer and closer to the museum.

Below is the walking map from Kichijoji Station to Ghibli Museum.

After visiting the Ghibli Museum, we caught the Ghibli bus back to Mitaka Station. Buses run every 10 minutes.

The total journey time from Ghibli Museum to Tokyo Station via Mitaka Station is about 50 minutes.

What to do near Ghibli Museum – Inokashira Park

In the area around Kichijoji Station, there are plenty of places to both shop and eat. Explore the covered shopping arcade, lanes and small streets to discover shops selling homewares, food, clothes, electronics, antiques and more. There is also plenty to see and do in Inokashira Park, and you could easily spend a relaxed half-day in this park alone. Unfortunately, we only had time for a walkthrough of the park, but this was still enough to appreciate the beauty of Inokashira Park.

It’s a green and picturesque park much loved by locals and which has a very relaxed atmosphere. If you visit Japan during Spring, you can enjoy the plum blossoms in March and the cherry blossoms in early April. It’s a great place to unwind and have a picnic while enjoying the Sakura blossoms. We visited at the tail end of Sakura season when the cherry blossoms had passed their full glory. The park is equally beautiful in other seasons, from the lush greens of Summer to the reds and golds of Autumn/Fall.

Inokashira Park is centred around Inokashira Pond, where you can hire a swan boat, paddle boat or rowboat and enjoy the park’s beauty from a different perspective.

The Inokashira Benzaiten shrine is a small shrine to Benzaiten, the goddess of water, located on an island in Inokashira Pond. The buildings and grounds of the shrine provide a striking contrast to the green foliage of the surrounding trees.

The park also offers plenty of recreational facilities, including play equipment and an outdoor stage, cafes and, depending on when you visit, you can find local street artists and musicians performing.

There is also a small zoo located in Inokashira Park. We chose not to visit partly due to lack of time but also due to concerns about how the animals may be treated. On a previous trip to Japan, we visited the Ueno Zoo and were very disappointed about the conditions animals lived in, which were in stark contrast to the way animals in Australian zoos are cared for. Online reviews for Inokashira Park Zoo also raise concerns about the size and design of animal enclosures and the way some animals are handled and treated.

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