Azabudai Hills in Tokyo

What Azabudai Hills actually is

Azabudai Hills covers 8.1 hectares of Minato City between three older Mori Building projects: Roppongi Hills to the west, Toranomon Hills to the east, Ark Hills to the north. Mori opened it on 24 November 2023 after a project that had run since March 1989, when the company began buying out the landowners and residents of the old Azabudai blocks. Construction itself took only four years, from August 2019. The bill came to about ¥640 billion, roughly $5.3 billion.

Three towers stand on the site. Mori JP Tower reaches 325.2 metres over 64 floors and took the title of tallest building in Japan from Osaka's Abeno Harukas the moment it topped out. Residence B rises 262.8 metres and Residence A 237.2 metres. Pelli Clarke & Partners drew the towers, Sou Fujimoto handled interiors, and Heatherwick Studio designed the low-rise buildings that curl around the base like a landscape pergola. That last piece is what makes the place photograph unlike anything else in Tokyo: green roofs that fold down to ground level, so the buildings read as hills rather than blocks.

About 20,000 people work here and roughly 3,500 live here, in 1,400 apartments that include the Aman Residences on floors 56 to 65. The complex also holds The British School in Tokyo, a Keio University preventive medicine centre, LEED Platinum certification in two categories, and electricity drawn entirely from renewable sources.

teamLab Borderless: what it costs and how to book it

The museum opened on 9 February 2024 on level B1 of Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza B, and it is the reason most visitors come. Adult admission uses date-based pricing: the official 2026 calendar starts at ¥3,600 on quiet weekdays in winter and summer, moves through ¥4,000 and ¥4,400, and reaches ¥5,600 on the busiest spring and autumn slots. Call it $23 to $36. Two things drive the number: the date, and the entry time you pick within it, which swings the price by about ¥800 on the same day. Children aged 4 to 12 pay ¥1,500 flat. Buying at the door costs more than buying on the official site, and slots sell out, so book ahead. Tickets open two months in advance and each one carries a timed entry.

Current hours are 8:30 to 21:00 with last entry an hour before closing. A few 2026 dates run to 22:00 and 1 September closes at 17:00; the museum shuts entirely on Tuesday 25 August, Tuesday 8 September and Tuesday 20 October. Check the official page before you lock in a date.

Three rules catch people out. There is no re-entry, so eat first. There is no map, by design, because the artworks migrate between rooms. And no strollers go in at all, though wheelchairs do, with some works out of reach. Photography is welcome; anything over 30 centimetres, including selfie sticks and tripods, is not. Mirrored floors run through several rooms, and the staff hand out wrap skirts for anyone who arrives in one. All three guided tours on this page include the ticket and the timed slot, and the full ticket breakdown by age and pass type sits on its own page.

The observation deck question

Search for an Azabudai Hills observation deck and you will find plenty of pages describing a free 33rd-floor Sky Lobby with Tokyo Tower at eye level. That access ended on 18 April 2024. The 33rd and 34th floors now serve people using Hills House Azabudai, Dining 33, the Sky Room Café & Bar and the Dining 33 patisserie, plus office tenants and residents.

The practical route up is Sky Room: ¥500 per person at the door, about $3.20, plus at least one drink, with coffee starting around ¥800. Take the S2 elevator on level 1 and staff will point you to the counter on 34. Opening runs 10:00 to 21:00 on weekdays and from 9:00 at weekends, and the floor closes for private resident events without much warning.

What you get for the ¥500 is genuinely good. Tokyo Tower stands at almost the same height as the glass, close enough to fill a phone frame, and on a clear winter afternoon Mount Fuji appears to the west. Compare that with ¥3,000 at Shibuya Sky and the price stops looking like a tourist trap. It is still not an observation deck, and no one at Azabudai Hills calls it one.

Where to eat, from ¥400 to ¥14,900

Azabudai Hills Market fills the Garden Plaza C basement and opened in spring 2024. Long-established Tokyo food names took the stalls: the Hiiyama butcher, The Rice Shop Sumida, prepared food from the Torishiki yakitori kitchen, plus a fishmonger, bakeries and a wine counter under art-deco arches. Buy a bento here and eat it outside on Central Green for a fraction of what the restaurants charge.

At the other end sits Yoroniku Tokyo Azabudai Hills on Tower Plaza 3F, the third address of chef-owner Vanne Kuwahara's wagyu kaiseki restaurant after Aoyama and Ebisu. Courses run around ¥14,900, about $95, dinner only from 17:00, closed Mondays, and the private rooms book out weeks ahead. Florilège, the two-star restaurant that moved here from Gaienmae, sits in the same building. For coffee, % Arabica has a counter on the upper retail floors and a queue most afternoons.

The free half of Azabudai Hills

Central Green runs to 6,000 m² of lawn, water and planting in the middle of the site, part of 24,000 m² of greenery holding about 320 plant species. Office workers eat lunch on the grass, families use the play areas, and nobody checks anything at the edge because there is no edge to check.

The public art is the other free draw. Yoshitomo Nara's work sits outdoors along with pieces by Olafur Eliasson, and the Azabudai Hills Gallery in the B1 courtyard runs ticketed temporary shows, so check what is on before you plan around it. Walking the Heatherwick low-rise, in and out of its planted terraces and down through the sunken courtyards, takes about 40 minutes and costs nothing.

Seasonal programming fills Central Green through the year: cherry blossom in late March and early April, an illumination from mid-November, and a Christmas market through December that has become one of the better ones in Tokyo.

Getting there

Kamiyacho Station on the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line puts you two minutes from teamLab Borderless through Exit 5, and an underground passage links the station directly to Garden Plaza B, so you never surface. Roppongi-Itchome on the Namboku Line sits six minutes away through Exit 4, on the same underground link. From Roppongi Station on the Hibiya and Oedo lines, count ten minutes on foot; from Azabujuban, eleven.

Tokyo Tower is a 12-minute walk south, Zojo-ji temple 15 minutes, Roppongi Hills 12 minutes west, and the National Art Center about 15 minutes northwest. That cluster is why the Roppongi art route tour works: the three art stops sit within a short taxi ride of each other.

teamLab Borderless has no parking of its own. Drivers use the Azabudai Hills P6 lot, take the D elevator to B1, and the museum entrance is immediately left. Show your parking ticket at the information counter with an online ticket and you get a discount.

How much time to give it

Two hours covers the complex on foot with a coffee. Add two more for teamLab Borderless, because nobody leaves that museum in the 60 minutes they planned, and there is no time limit once you are inside. Half a day is the honest answer for a first visit that includes the museum, and a guided tour compresses it well because someone else has already solved the ticket, the timed slot and the route between buildings.

A workable order for a self-guided visit:

• Book the earliest teamLab slot you can stand, 8:30 or 9:00, while the mirrored rooms are still empty.
• Eat afterwards at the Market in Garden Plaza C, not before, since re-entry is not allowed.
• Walk the Heatherwick low-rise and Central Green in the middle of the day when the light reaches the sunken courtyards.
• Go up to Sky Room late afternoon so Tokyo Tower catches the last sun and then lights up.
• Finish on foot at Tokyo Tower, 12 minutes south, or double back to Roppongi for dinner.

Is it worth it, honestly

If you have three days in Tokyo and no particular interest in architecture, Azabudai Hills does not beat Senso-ji or Shibuya for a slot. It is a very good shopping and office complex with a world-class museum underneath it, and the shopping is aimed at people buying Cartier rather than souvenirs.

If you do care about buildings, or you were going to teamLab Borderless anyway, the case is easy. The museum alone justifies the trip, the Heatherwick roofs are the most interesting piece of new architecture in central Tokyo, and the whole thing sits two minutes from a Hibiya Line exit. Come for teamLab, give the complex the extra hour on either side, and skip the Sky Room if ¥500 plus a drink for a view feels like the wrong trade on a cloudy day.