teamLab Borderless: Tickets, Hours and the Planets Question

A museum with no map, on purpose

teamLab is a collective of artists, programmers, engineers and mathematicians founded in Tokyo in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko and four university friends. They built websites and shop interiors until Takashi Murakami showed their work in 2011 and pulled them into the art world proper. Borderless is their idea of what a museum could be if the art refused to stay in its room.

Nothing here has a label, and the staff will not give you a floor plan. Artworks cross between spaces, respond to where people stand, and interrupt each other: a flock of crows tears through a room of flowers, the flowers regrow behind them. Stand still for four minutes and the same wall shows you a different season. That is the whole design principle, and it is also why the museum feels bigger than its floor area.

The rooms people queue for are Bubble Universe, a mirrored chamber of glowing orbs, and Infinite Crystal World, a hanging thicket of lights you walk directly into. On busy days Infinite Crystal World runs on numbered tickets you pull inside the teamLab app rather than a physical queue.

Why it moved, and what that means for your search results

The first Borderless opened in Odaiba in 2018 and took a Guinness World Record as the most-visited museum devoted to a single art group, with 2.2 million people through the doors in 2019 alone. Palette Town, the complex that housed it, was slated for redevelopment, and the museum closed in August 2022. It reopened in Azabudai Hills on 9 February 2024.

This matters because plenty of older pages, photos and even map pins still point at Odaiba. If a guide tells you to take the Yurikamome line, it was written before 2022. The museum is now a two-minute walk from Kamiyacho Station on the Hibiya Line, and the third teamLab venue in Tokyo, Planets in Toyosu, is a separate ticket in a separate part of the city.

In 2025 Borderless counted about 1.69 million visitors against 2.51 million at Planets. TIME put Borderless on its World's Greatest Places list for 2024.

What a ticket costs, category by category

Adult pricing is dynamic in two directions at once, which is the part most summaries get wrong. The date sets a band, and the entry time you choose inside that date moves the price by roughly ¥800. Cheapest weekday morning in a quiet month: ¥3,600.

Peak slot on a peak date: ¥5,600. Prices below were read off the official ticket flow on 3 August 2026, with dollar figures at ¥157 to the dollar.

Is the ¥12,000 Flexible Pass worth it

For most people, no. It buys one thing: freedom from the entry time. You still cannot re-enter, you may still wait at the door, at EN TEA HOUSE and at the busier artworks, and last entry is still an hour before closing. At roughly three times the cheapest adult ticket it makes sense if your day in Tokyo is genuinely unplannable, and not otherwise.

The better move for almost everyone is to book a fixed slot early and treat it as the fixed point the rest of the day is built around.

The rooms worth waiting for

There is no route, so nobody can hand you an order to see things in. What you can do is know which spaces reward a wait rather than a photograph on the way past.

Bubble Universe is the one that ends up on everyone's camera roll: a mirrored room of glowing spheres that shift colour and appear to repeat outward without end. It runs an entry queue at busy hours, which is the price of it not being packed once you are inside.

Infinite Crystal World is a thicket of hanging light strands you walk directly into, controlled through the app rather than a physical queue on busy days. Pull a number early in the visit and come back to it.

The Universe of Water Particles waterfall is the survivor from Odaiba, a wall of falling light that breaks around anyone who stands in it. Flowers grow and die on the same surface across the year. Future Park, the children's section, has Sketch Ocean: colour in a fish on paper, hand it over, and it swims into the projected sea a minute later, which buys parents a genuinely useful twenty minutes.

• Bubble Universe: mirrored orbs, limited capacity, worth the queue.
• Infinite Crystal World: app-issued numbers on busy days, so claim one early.
• Universe of Water Particles: stand in the waterfall rather than photographing it.
• Future Park and Sketch Ocean: children draw a fish and watch it swim off.
• EN TEA HOUSE: its own counter and its own wait, and the tea blooms in the bowl.

When to book and when to go

Tickets open two months in advance on the official site and the good slots go first, particularly across cherry blossom season and the November colour. Buying on the day is possible when the museum has not sold out, but the on-site price is higher than the online one, and a sellout on a Saturday is normal rather than unlucky.

The quietest visit is the first slot on a weekday. At 8:30 the mirrored rooms hold a handful of people and the photographs look like the marketing. By early afternoon on a weekend you are working around other visitors in every frame, and the popular rooms run a wait.

Check the calendar before you commit to a date. In 2026 the museum closes completely on Tuesday 25 August, Tuesday 8 September and Tuesday 20 October, shuts at 17:00 on 1 September, and runs late to 22:00 across 8 to 15 August and on many October dates.

Borderless or Planets: the honest split

They are not versions of the same museum, and the right answer depends on what you want the two hours to feel like.

Borderless has no route. Artworks leave their rooms, follow you down corridors and merge into each other, and you find things by wandering. It is the more cerebral of the two and the better one for anyone who likes being slightly lost. It also sits in Azabudai Hills, so the rest of the afternoon is already solved.

Planets, in Toyosu, is a fixed path and a physical experience: you go barefoot, wade through knee-deep water in a digital koi pond, and cross floors that give under your weight. Children and anyone travelling with them usually prefer it. It also drew 2.51 million visitors in 2025 against 1.69 million here, so book it further ahead.

If you only have time for one and you care about art, come here. If you are travelling with a seven-year-old, go to Toyosu.

• Pick Borderless for: no fixed route, the Bubble Universe and Crystal World rooms, a central location with dinner attached.
• Pick Planets for: barefoot, water, tactile floors, an easier win with young children.
• Both are teamLab, both take about two hours, and neither ticket works at the other.

The rules that catch people out

There is no re-entry. Leave for lunch and the ticket is spent, which is why the Azabudai Hills Market one floor up is an after, not a before. Inside there is no restaurant and no cafe beyond EN TEA HOUSE, where a digital flower blooms in the bowl and keeps blooming while tea remains in it. Vending machines cover water. Food from outside stays outside, drinks are fine.

Several rooms have mirrored floors. Skirts and dresses are a bad idea and the staff hand out wrap-around skirts to anyone who arrives in one. Photography and video are welcome and you can post whatever you like, but flash is banned and so is any support over 30 centimetres, which rules out tripods, monopods and selfie sticks.

Strollers are not allowed inside at all and go in the luggage room. Wheelchairs are admitted, though a few works cannot be reached, and the number of wheelchairs in the building at one time is capped, so a wait is possible. Children of elementary age or below need an adult of 18 or over, one adult for every five children.

How long you actually need

Two hours. The museum sells a timed entry but no exit time, and nobody rushes you out. People who allow an hour spend it walking briskly past things that were about to change.

Download the teamLab app before you arrive. It carries the concept behind whichever artwork is nearest you, which replaces the wall labels the museum refuses to print, and it issues the numbered tickets for Infinite Crystal World. Doubling back is worth it: a room you saw at the start will be running a different sequence by the time you leave.

The Light Sculpture - Flow space reopened on 8 July 2026 with a special exhibition, On the Asymmetry of the Universe, built around two new series. One sculpture of light exists in the room and casts no reflection; another exists only inside the mirror. It runs to 8 October 2026 and needs no extra ticket.

What to do with the two hours either side

The museum is one floor of a complex that costs nothing to walk, which is the part visitors miss when they arrive twenty minutes before their slot and leave straight afterwards.

Before: come an hour early and walk the Heatherwick low-rise, the planted terraces and Central Green above you. On a fine day the free half of Azabudai Hills is a better hour than most paid attractions in Minato.

After: eat at the Azabudai Hills Market in the Garden Plaza C basement, one level up and two minutes away, where bento and deli counters start around ¥400. Then take the S2 lift to Sky Room on 34 for the Tokyo Tower view, which costs ¥500 plus a drink since the free 33rd-floor deck closed in April 2024.

If you would rather someone else stitched that together, the 4-hour art and architecture tour does the complex first and the museum second, and finishes at the National Art Center.

Getting there

Exit 5 of Kamiyacho Station on the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line is two minutes away, and an underground passage runs from the station into Garden Plaza B, so in July heat or January wind you never surface. Exit 4 of Roppongi-Itchome on the Namboku Line is six minutes on the same passage. From Roppongi Station itself, allow ten minutes above ground.

The museum has no car park. Drivers use the Azabudai Hills P6 lot, take the D lift to B1, and the entrance is immediately on the left. Show the parking ticket at the information counter with an online ticket for a discount.

The address for a taxi driver: 麻布台ヒルズ ガーデンプラザB B1, 東京都港区麻布台1-2-4.