The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (Tokyo, Japan)

Studio Ghibli Inc. is a Japanese animation film studio that was previously a subsidiary of Tokuma Shoten, one of the largest entertainment publishers in Japan. Its provocative and emotional anime films are widely praised all over the world.


Hayao Miyazaki, born January 5, 1941 in Tokyo, is a director of Japanese animated films and is a co-founder of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki is the creator of many popular anime feature films as well as manga. Although largely unknown in the West outside of animation circles until Miramax released his film Princess Mononoke in 1999, his films have enjoyed commercial and critical success in Japan and East Asia.

(Sources: Wikipedia / Natasha Baucas on Flickr)

Buying Tickets
Since the Ghibli Museum is extremely popular with Japan residents and foreigners alike, a reservation voucher must be purchased in advance. The admission fees are listed here. You can actually buy your voucher from outside Japan, check this website for information. Within Japan, you can buy the voucher using one of the following ways as listed on this page: (1) via the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB); (2) via Lawson convenience store's Loppi stations; and (3) via LawsonTicket.com telephone and online service.

Getting There
From Tokyo, Kanda or Shinjuku stations, take the JR Chuo Line to Mitaka. From our experience, it's approximately 20 minutes away if you take the train from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. Once you get to Mitaka, be sure to take the South Exit and then walk along the Tamagawa Josui Waterworks to the museum (see map here) or make like a Totoro and take the Cat Bus (also known as the Nekobasu. Neko = cat, basu=bus). The fare is 200 yen for a one-way trip and 300 yen for round-trip; half-price for children under 12 years old. Please take note that the museum does not have a parking lot.

The Nekobasu is one of the two most recognizable characters in the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro. It is a large creature, depicted as a grinning cat with a hollow body that serves as a bus, complete with windows and seats coated with fur, and a large bushy tail. A door magically appears when a person would like to board it to travel.

The first thing you'll notice when you get to the museum is that it doesn't look like any museum (or building, for that matter) that you've ever been to. There's also a sculpture garden on the rooftop featuring one of the major attractions, a gigantic cast-iron Laputa Robot Soldier.

The unusual structure was designed by Hayao Miyazaki himself and, as we saw in the official commemorative Ghibli Museum DVD (subtitled in English) we bought, the building's design was inspired by the quaint cliff-top village of Calcata, Italy where walkways are narrow and maze-like and houses don't have definite form but instead follow the natural structure of the cliff they're perched upon.

Before you enter, you have to exchange your voucher with the actual ticket - a film strip featuring three frames from a Studio Ghibli film. Cool, huh? The ticket will give you one-time access to the Saturn Theatre where you can view a museum-exclusive short film. They have three 15-minute screenings per schedule, only one of which you can watch during the two-hour tour. We got to see a My Neighbor Totoro sequel called "Mei and the Kitten Bus" that's just as adorable and whimsical as the original.

(All photos are by my husband)

The interior of the museum is as playful and unusual as the outside and once you step in, you will want to begin identifying scenes from Ghibli films on the intricate stained glass windows and wall & ceiling murals. The building is designed in such a way that there is no definite path to follow. The thrill is in losing your way around it -- in fact, it feels like you just entered the world of Totoro.

The building has two floors that are connected by various staircases, a metallic spiral staircase in the center, and an old-fashioned elevator. Images and tiny details from our favorite Studio Ghibli movies are scattered everywhere - on the walls, floors and ceiling, on banisters, even on the faucet knobs in the bathroom - so be careful not to miss them.

On the first floor are interactive exhibits detailing Studio Ghibli's animation process. One amazing display, the "Bouncing Totoro Zoetrope" (see photo), shows how images are animated using strobe lights. This video presentation by renowned interactive media artist Toshio Iwai shows a bit of it (from minutes 1:10 to 1:30). Other stations consist of layered cell diorama studies and 3D prototypes of characters in sequential motion. The Saturn Theatre is also on this floor.

On the second floor are rooms patterned after what their art and design studios must be like: shelves upon shelves with photo albums of reference materials and art books, walls tacked with actual storyboards and real background art, bottles and bottles of paint of every Pantone color imaginable, couches, desks with ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts, etc etc etc.

The third floor houses the featured exhibit for the year. The year we visited (2006), we were treated to a showcase of the works of Aardman Animations, particularly Wallace and Gromit. Storyboards, sketches, animation studies and actual clay models and plaster molds for A Grand Day Out, A Close Shave, The Wrong Trousers, and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit were on display. There's also a Cat Bus Room where kids ages 5 and below can play, and a children's reading room. Mamma Aiuto, the museum gift shop, is also on this level.

Photography inside the museum is not allowed so here's a photoessay of the museum's opening party in 2001. There are a few shots of the interiors.

(Photo credits: Stained glass door photo by cloneofsnake on Flickr / Totoro Zoetrope from Ghibli World / Aardman Animations Ghibli Exhibit from Tokyo Art Beat)

You're allotted two hours to tour the museum afterwhich the next batch of tourists will be let in. You can stay and take photos outside or on the rooftop or relax at the bright-yellow-and-red Straw Hat Cafe - a reference to "My Neighbor Totoro"'s lead character Mei-chan's headgear of choice - where they serve home-style cold and hot meals, snacks and desserts.

Touring this museum was a fantastic opportunity any Studio Ghibli fan won't want to miss. For my husband Arnold and me, it's probably the closest we'll ever get to meeting the genius Hayao Miyazaki so it's an experience we'll definitely cherish forever.


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