PLAY!, Tokyo

Why you should experience PLAY! in Tokyo, Japan.

PLAY! is an inventive art museum where Tachikawa's creative reinvention, picture-book culture, graphic design and immersive exhibition making dissolve the conventional boundary between looking at art and physically entering its imaginative world.

Set along Green Springs near Sansan Road and just steps from Tachikawa Station, the museum builds exhibitions around “pictures and words,” using illustration, manga, books, animation and spatial installations as equally serious forms of artistic expression. Galleries are conceived around changing subjects rather than a permanent collection, allowing original drawings and manuscripts to move into environments shaped through sound, scale, movement and participation. PLAY! PARK, PLAY! CAFE and PLAY! SHOP extend the same philosophy beyond the exhibition rooms, creating a cultural complex structured around discovery across generations. The result is a museum where Tachikawa's emerging cultural character finds an unusually confident voice, treating familiar visual stories as material for ambitious exhibition design rather than objects confined to display cases.

What you should know about PLAY!.

PLAY! is best known for opening on June 10, 2020 as a cultural complex combining PLAY!, PLAY! PARK, PLAY! CAFE and PLAY! SHOP inside the newly developed GREEN SPRINGS district, after its planned April debut was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. PLAY! Project, formed by Cosmo Merchandising, Blue Sheep and A&B Holdings, established “pictures and words” as the museum's organizing idea, while Takaharu and Yui Tezuka's Tezuka Architects designed the interiors and Atsuki Kikuchi directed the visual identity. The museum launched simultaneously with tupera tupera no kaoten. and Eric Carle: A Book to Play, establishing from its first day a program connecting Japanese picture-book experimentation with internationally recognized illustration. Carle's exhibition organized original works from more than 80 books around ten forms of play including moving, listening, searching and passing through, demonstrating the participatory exhibition language that would become central to PLAY!.

Eric Carle established an important international foundation for that program through original illustrations from The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me and Dream Snow, with the museum translating his conception of books as objects for play into large-scale environments. Arnold Lobel followed in 2021 through Japan's first exhibition devoted to the creator of Frog and Toad, bringing approximately 200 original drawings and sketches from around 30 books into the museum during the series' fiftieth anniversary. Komako Sakai, Samiro Yunoki and Dick Bruna subsequently expanded the program across contemporary Japanese illustration, textile-derived visual language and European graphic design, while later exhibitions continued moving between manga, picture books and artists whose work crosses conventional disciplinary boundaries. Tezuka Architects and Atsuki Kikuchi provide continuity beneath those changing subjects, giving PLAY! a spatial and graphic system designed to accumulate new interpretations as exhibitions replace one another.

How to fold PLAY! into your trip.

PLAY! works naturally as the opening chapter of a Tachikawa afternoon devoted to imagination across radically different scales, moving from demonstrated worlds into an open-air collection of international contemporary art before concluding amid the enormous landscape created from the former Tachikawa Airfield.

Begin at Faret Tachikawa Art, created during the district's 1994 redevelopment under art director Fram Kitagawa, where 109 works by 92 artists from 36 countries turn ventilation shafts, bollards and other urban infrastructure into an outdoor collection, carrying PLAY's visual experimentation directly into the streets. Continue to Polar Science Museum, opened by the National Institute of Polar Research in 2010, where Antarctic meteorites including lunar and Martian specimens, expedition snow vehicles, ice-core drilling equipment and an aurora theater shift the afternoon from artistic imagination toward the physical extremes of scientific exploration. Conclude at Showa Kinen Park, created across the former U.S. military Tachikawa Airfield as a national project commemorating Emperor Shōwa's fiftieth year on the throne, whose first 70 hectares opened in 1983 before the planned landscape expanded toward 180 hectares of gardens, woodland and recreation. The progression moves from PLAY's immersive interpretation of pictures and stories through Kitagawa's art embedded within the city and polar science reaching beyond it into Showa Kinen Park's reclaimed airfield landscape, revealing Tachikawa as a place where creative reinvention consistently changes the meaning of space.

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