teamLab Planets vs Borderless: which Tokyo museum to pick with kids

Planets is the one to book if you only have room for one. It is barefoot, it is wet, it runs on a single fixed route, and it closes at the end of 2027, which is the part most people planning a trip two years out have not registered yet. Borderless is the better museum for adults and older kids who want to wander without a plan, and it is roughly twenty minutes closer to central Tokyo.

We have done both, though not in the same year. We took the girls to Planets in late 2022 during our first long Tokyo stretch, and we did Borderless in June 2024 at Azabudai Hills, four months after it reopened there. Adult tickets at both start at ¥3,600 and both run dynamic pricing, so this is not really a money decision. It comes down to whether your family wants to be handed a route or handed a maze.

What actually separates them

Both museums are made by the same collective, both use the same real-time rendering rather than looped video, and both sell timed slots that go quiet on a Tuesday morning and sell out three weeks ahead on a Saturday. The difference that matters when you are travelling with kids is structural, and it is not about which artworks are prettier.

Planets moves you through about seven artwork spaces in a set order, and you cannot go back. You put your shoes in a locker at the entrance, you walk on soft flooring and through water, and the route ends when it ends. That constraint is the reason it works with small children. There is no decision-making, no doubling back, no arguments about what to see next, and no way to lose anyone because everyone is moving in the same direction at the same pace.

Borderless is built on the opposite premise. There is no map, deliberately, because the artworks migrate between rooms and the concept collapses if you can plan a route. teamLab hands you the app instead, which reads out the concept of whichever work you are standing closest to. Our two hours there were mostly spent following the girls down corridors to see where they went, which was fun for us and would have been miserable with a two-year-old.

teamLab Planets: barefoot, wet, and on a clock

Planets sits in Toyosu on the bay, one minute from the north exit of Shin-Toyosu on the Yurikamome line, or ten minutes on foot from exit 7 at Toyosu on the Yurakucho line. It opened in July 2018 as a temporary venue and has been extended repeatedly. The current run ends at the close of 2027, and teamLab has not signalled another extension.

The water rooms are the reason it exists. You wade through a shin-to-knee depth of chlorinated water while koi swim past your legs and scatter into flowers when they hit you, and then you sit in the Floating Flower Garden underneath live orchids that lift as you approach. The Infinite Crystal Universe is the one the kids remembered longest, because you throw stars into it from your phone and watch them arrive.

Two things have changed since our visit that we have not seen ourselves. teamLab has expanded the venue considerably, adding the Athletics Forest, Future Park, and a Catching and Collecting Extinct Forest that runs on a separate app. Planets drew about 2.51 million visitors in 2025, which is more than Borderless by roughly 800,000, and the expansion is why. Budget two hours rather than the ninety minutes we needed in 2022.

teamLab Borderless: dry and deliberately confusing

Borderless reopened on 9 February 2024 in the basement of Garden Plaza B at Azabudai Hills, a two-minute walk from exit 5 at Kamiyacho on the Hibiya line or six minutes from exit 4 at Roppongi-Itchome. Both stations connect to the building underground, so you never surface, which is worth knowing in August. It is permanent, with no closing date attached.

Nothing here is wet and nothing requires taking your shoes off. The artworks are projections, light sculptures, and mirrored rooms, and they cross between spaces on their own schedule. A flock of crows will leave one room and arrive in another. The Light Sculpture space reopened in July 2026 with a special exhibition running through 8 October, so the layout we saw in 2024 is already partly different.

The practical trade is comfort for structure. Nobody gets wet, nobody needs a change of clothes, and the EN TEA HOUSE gives you somewhere to sit down. In exchange you spend real time not knowing where you are, and with a five-year-old that stops being charming somewhere around minute forty.

What a family of five actually pays

Both venues charge the same headline rates and both use dynamic pricing, so the number you see depends on the date you pick. Weekends, Japanese school holidays, and morning slots all cost more. Adult tickets at Borderless can climb as high as ¥5,600 on a peak date, which is the one meaningful pricing gap between the two.

For us that is two adults and three kids under 13, so ¥11,700 at base rate at either venue, or about $79 at current rates. The ¥12,000 priority passes are per person and only make sense if your date is sold out and you are flying home tomorrow.

Getting to each one

Borderless wins on transport by a clear margin if you are staying anywhere central. Kamiyacho is on the Hibiya line, which runs through Ginza, Akihabara, and Ueno, and the underground passage takes you to the museum entrance without going outside. From an Asakusa base you are looking at around thirty minutes door to door.

Planets takes longer from most places because Toyosu is out on the bay. From Ueno the cleanest route is the Yurakucho line to Toyosu and a ten-minute walk. There is a paid shuttle bus from GINZA SIX if you are coming from that side, which is worth taking, because teamLab has flagged heavy congestion on the public Toei bus route from Tokyo Station and Tsukiji toward Shin-Toyosu. Toyosu Market is a five-minute walk from the door, so a fish-market morning and an afternoon Planets slot is a genuinely efficient day.

What to wear and what goes in the locker

For Planets, wear shorts or trousers that roll above the knee, and pick shoes you can get off standing up. Socks and tights come off too. You cannot carry anything into the artwork spaces, so everything goes into a free locker measuring 23cm by 34cm by 37cm, and anything larger gets wire-locked in the stroller area. If your clothes get wet, staff will stop you entering the next room until you dry off or change, and there are towels to rent.

The free rental shorts are the detail most guides skip. They run from XS to 6L, you ask any staff member inside the museum, and you hand them back on the way out. There are rental shoes as well for anyone in backless sandals or heels, since some artworks will not let you through in those. Nobody charges you for either.

Borderless needs none of that. Wear what you would wear to dinner. The only thing to plan around is the mirrored floors, and there are wrap skirts stacked next to those works if you need one. Bags go in free lockers there too, and food is not allowed inside beyond capped drinks.

Doing both in one day

It is possible and we would not do it. Planets runs 8:00 to 22:00 and Borderless 8:30 to 21:00, with last entry an hour before closing at both, so the clock is not the obstacle. The obstacle is that neither allows re-entry and the two sit about forty minutes apart on public transport, which turns a good day into a logistics exercise.

If you are set on it, take an early Planets slot, eat at Vegan Ramen UZU inside the venue rather than hunting for lunch in Toyosu, and put Borderless in the late afternoon. UZU is only reachable after you have entered Planets, and it holds a Bib Gourmand from the Kyoto and Osaka Michelin guide, so it is a better lunch than the area otherwise offers. Last orders for ramen are thirty minutes before it closes at 21:30.

The more sensible version is one museum and something else. We would pair Planets with Toyosu Market in the morning, or Borderless with an evening in Roppongi, and the full shape of that week is in our five-day Tokyo itinerary.

Booking without getting stuck

Book two to three weeks out for a weekend or a school-holiday date, and about a week out for a weekday. Planets releases tickets by month rather than on a rolling window, so if your dates are far ahead the slots may simply not be on sale yet. Both venues let you move a booked date up to three times through their own ticket stores, with changes locked two hours before your entry time.

Tickets bought through resellers cannot be changed through teamLab, only through whoever sold them. Klook is the one third-party seller teamLab lists as official for both venues, which is why we book there rather than through a generic aggregator, and the price usually lands a little under the door rate.

Get your data sorted before you land

Both museums lean on your phone. The teamLab app reads out artwork concepts at Borderless where there are no wall captions, the Infinite Crystal Universe at Planets only works if you can load it, and the Catching and Collecting Extinct Forest is a separate app download. Arriving in Japan without data means you pay for the ticket and skip half of what it buys you.

We run a Holafly eSIM across the family. One install covers 160-plus destinations on the monthly Plans subscription, the hotspot is included so the girls' iPads run off it, and when a plan lapses Always On keeps 1GB a month running in 70-plus countries so we are never fully dark. Our full breakdown is in the Japan eSIM guide.

Questions we get about these two