Why you should experience Cute Cube Harajuku in Tokyo, Japan.
Cute Cube Harajuku is an exuberant shopping complex where Harajuku's kawaii imagination, youth-fashion identity, graphic experimentation and appetite for visual self-expression converge within a building conceived specifically for Takeshita Street.
Set along Takeshita Street near Meiji-dori and just steps from Harajuku Station, the three-story complex opens to the pedestrian corridor through an 37-meter frontage and semi-open architecture designed to absorb the street's intense visual energy. Kajima's design team translated Harajuku's deliberately crowded aesthetic into a façade of shifting forms and colors, while exterior voids and direct escalator access draw the movement of Takeshita Street upward through the building. Sebastian Masuda extended that language through sculptural works created for the entrance and terrace, embedding the artist behind 6%DOKIDOKI within the architecture itself. The result is a shopping complex where architecture, public art and retail become a physical expression of the kawaii culture that made Harajuku internationally recognizable.
What you should know about Cute Cube Harajuku.
Cute Cube Harajuku is best known for opening on September 6, 2013 as a Mitsubishi Corporation Urban Development project conceived as a global platform for Harajuku kawaii culture, with Kajima designing the steel-framed building around a semi-open configuration and an 37-meter frontage on Takeshita Street. Art director Masayoshi Kodaira created the visual character by translating “CUTE” into circles and “CUBE” into squares, while Sebastian Masuda produced two sculptural installations for the entrance and third-floor terrace. The opening lineup contained ten businesses spanning fashion, accessories, food and character merchandise, including Monki's first Tokyo store, ATOMICBOXX and Sanrio's teenage-focused sanrio vivitix HARAJUKU. Mitsubishi Corporation Urban Development president Hirokazu Murata, Takeshita Street merchants' association chairman Kazuhiro Osozawa, Sebastian Masuda, Ayumi Seto and Yura marked the September 6 debut with an opening ceremony that explicitly connected the building with Harajuku's creative community.
Kajima architects Hiroyuki Sakamoto, Tatsuya Komatsubara and Tsunehiro Iwasaki developed the building around a design concept they called “gocha-kawaii,” embracing Takeshita Street's dense collision of colors, signs and storefronts as architectural material. The completed structure placed three floors above ground and one below within the compact Jingumae site, while its pop-colored exterior sought visual continuity with the surrounding commercial corridor without disappearing into it. TeamLab introduced another strand of digital authorship at the original ATOMICBOXX store through teamLabCamera, a Facebook-connected installation that photographed participants against animated logos, speech bubbles and paint effects before processing the resulting images. Sakamoto, Komatsubara, Iwasaki and TeamLab extended Cute Cube Harajuku's founding kawaii concept from graphic character and sculpture into architecture and participatory digital media, making creative authorship part of the project at several scales.
How to fold Cute Cube Harajuku into your trip.
Cute Cube Harajuku works as the commercial opening to a daytime progression through fashion experimentation, ukiyo-e collecting and independent artistic expression, connecting Takeshita Street's youth culture with three distinct forms of creativity rooted in Harajuku.
Begin at Laforet Harajuku, opened in 1978 and deeply associated with emerging Japanese fashion labels, where successive generations of designers turned retail into a laboratory for the subcultural styles that reshaped Harajuku's international image. Continue to Ota Memorial Museum of Art, opened in 1980 around Seizo Ota V's ukiyo-e collection, where works by artists including Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige place the district's contemporary visual appetite within a much longer Japanese tradition of popular imagery. Conclude at Design Festa Gallery, opened in 1998 as a permanent extension of the Design Festa movement, where independently controlled exhibition spaces allow painting, photography, sculpture, fashion and installation to coexist. The progression moves from fashion as subcultural invention through Edo popular imagery into unrestricted contemporary creation, revealing the deeper continuum of visual experimentation surrounding Cute Cube Harajuku.
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