How to Get Tickets for the Ghibli Museum (and What It Is Like)

How to Get Tickets for the Ghibli Museum

It should go without saying, but the Ghibli Museum is only available to visit with advanced reservations. It should be no surprise that this museum is among the most popular in all of Tokyo, and tickets sell out fast!

The process to buy tickets is pretty straightforward, thankfully, but you’ll be competing with thousands of others for the coveted timeslots.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am Japan Standard Time (JST) on the 10th of each month for the following month. So if you want to visit in March, look for tickets on February 10th at 10 am Japan time. When you log into the ticketing site once tickets become available, you can choose from available entry times- typically 10 am, 12 pm, 2 pm, and 4 pm entries.

Timeslots tend to allow a one-hour entry period (so, if you have 10 am tickets, you can enter between 10 and 11), with a gap in between to allow for guests to leave before the next round of visitors is admitted, and the museum is typically open until 6 pm most days. (As always, please reconfirm as details such as these are liable to change.)

Those with the best luck at snagging tickets will be quick at refreshing the page; however, with many others attempting to snag a ticket, getting a booking can be quite tricky all around. For the best luck, be sure to keep your schedule flexible- the more days and times you can get a ticket, the better your odds of snagging a ticket.

But for us, we logged on a bit late, and tickets were already sold out. Thankfully, we still managed to score a ticket. So let’s jump into something you may want to try if tickets appear to sell out.

Don’t Give Up – We Got Tickets Later

When we first logged on, we realized we messed up the time zone differences, and tickets had already gone on sale. They were, naturally, completely sold out. But we kept refreshing the page, and after a little while, something interesting happened. We started seeing tickets pop up as available.

Over the course of 30-40 minutes after tickets went on sale, we saw several timeslots become available again. Not a lot, but a ticket here, a ticket there over our dates. We can only speculate why this may be, such as perhaps bots timing out or payments failing, but it seemed like a decent number of previously locked-in timeslots returned to the general queue.

It took a few tries, as these also got scooped up rather quickly, but we ended up playing cat-and-mouse with this one for a little bit and were able to score our tickets about 45 minutes after they originally went on sale. We can’t guarantee it would happen to everyone, or on every release, but don’t get discouraged if tickets fully book up right away- refresh for a little while longer!

So, What’s the Ghibli Museum Like?

The Studio Ghibli Museum is quite an interesting spot in Tokyo, and I admit that I actually did not research this one much before snagging tickets. I like Studio Ghibli’s movies, and that was enough for me to want to visit their museum. Do I really need to say more?

But, I do have to say, it isn’t what I expected.

The museum itself is not so much focused on any specific movie or the history of the studio itself per se, but is rather more a museum focused on different elements of animation, with Ghibli movies, style, and art as the backdrop inside a whimsical house that you would expect to find in one of the popular films.

There is a room that shows how animation comes to life (I don’t want to spoil the details, but this was my favorite room). Another showcasing an art studio with frame-by-frame level drawings and design. An on-site movie theater shows exclusive short films from the Ghibli Museum. There was a kids’ playroom where young visitors could climb aboard a catbus from My Neighbor Totoro. We even saw a temporary exhibit showcasing the studio of an animator from the early days of film production. We could go on.

So while you are going to see elements of your favorite films throughout, and truly feel like you are inside the Miyazaki universe, this one focuses a bit more on elements that go into animated film production and have Ghibli art and whimsy as a backdrop. And even though a lot of the signage was in Japanese, we really felt like we got a great deal out of the museum all the same. It was simply fun!

Now, let’s circle back to one final, very important question- how much time do you need at the Ghibli Museum?

For us, we spent nearly two hours in the museum, but were a bit limited because we had one of the last entry timeslots into the day (4 pm) and had to be out by when it closed (6 pm). If we had more time, we likely would’ve taken a break at the on-site cafe and perhaps enjoyed a few more short films as well (despite our limited Japanese, we got the impression they may swap films throughout the day- we could be wrong here).

So circling back on getting your tickets, try and err on an earlier entry slot and avoid the 4 pm entry if you can- you’ll really want a decent amount of time here despite its smaller size! But, if 4 pm is all you can get, just keep the time in mind so you can see all the exhibits before they close.

Overall, the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo was quite the treat, and we are really happy to have scored tickets to this one!

The Ghibli Museum is located in Mitaka, Tokyo. For more information, check out their website