Hakone Open-Air Museum: Tickets, Hours and What to See

A Henry Moore sits on a lawn with a mountain behind it and nothing between the two. No rope, no glass, no guard telling you to step back. Seventy hectares of hillside in Hakone have been arranged so that sculpture and landscape share the same frame, and the effect is that you stop reading labels and start walking.

The Hakone Open-Air Museum charges ¥2,000 for adults, opens 09:00 to 17:00 every day of the year, and sits a two-minute walk from Chokoku-no-Mori Station on the Hakone Tozan railway. Allow two to three hours. It holds about a thousand sculptures outdoors and 300 Picasso works indoors.

The Picasso Exhibition Hall

Tickets, hours, and how long to stay

• Adults: ¥2,000

• University and high school students: ¥1,600

• Elementary and middle school students: ¥800

• Hours: 09:00 to 17:00, open 365 days a year, last admission 16:30

• Discount: holders of the Hakone Free Pass get reduced admission

• Saturdays: up to five school-age children enter free with each paying adult

Two hours is the minimum that does not feel rushed. Three is comfortable. Four if you photograph seriously, travel with children, or intend to sit in the Picasso hall properly.

The site is a hillside, so there is real walking involved and some of it is uphill. Wear shoes you can cover a couple of kilometers in.

Getting to the Hakone Open-Air Museum

The museum is beside Chokoku-no-Mori Station, one stop before Gora on the Hakone Tozan Railway, and the walk from the platform takes about two minutes.

From Tokyo, take the Odakyu line from Shinjuku to Hakone-Yumoto, then the Tozan railway up. The whole journey runs roughly two and a half hours. Buses also stop at Ninotaira Iriguchi, a few minutes' walk away.

Almost everyone arrives as part of the wider Hakone loop, which is the sensible approach since the museum sits directly on the route between Hakone-Yumoto and the ropeway.

Symphonic Sculpture

What is actually here

The collection runs to around a thousand works, with roughly 120 on display outdoors at any time and the rest rotating through the indoor galleries.

The Picasso Pavilion

Two Sculptures by Takao Tsuchida

The indoor highlight, holding about 300 Picasso works donated by his daughter Maya: ceramics, prints, paintings, and glass. The ceramics are the surprise, since most people know the paintings and have never seen how much time he spent on pottery in the last two decades of his life.

Photography is not permitted inside this building, which is the one place in the museum where that rule applies.

Symphonic Sculpture

Man and Pegasus

A tower you climb from the inside, its walls made entirely of stained glass, with a spiral staircase running up to an open viewing platform. The light changes completely depending on the weather and the hour, and on a bright day the interior is overwhelming. It is the single most photographed thing on the site.

Toshiko MacAdam's Woods of Net

Big Statues by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle

A vast hand-knitted crochet net suspended inside a timber pavilion built without nails, designed as a climbing structure for children. It is a serious textile artwork that children are meant to bounce in, which is a rare combination. Adults are not allowed in.

Henry Moore and the figurative works

Sphère-Trames

The museum holds a significant Moore collection on a dedicated slope, including Family Group, whose abstracted figures read as a family without resembling one. Moore wanted his work seen outdoors against landscape, and this hillside does that better than most galleries manage.

Family Group by Henry Moore

Carl Milles' The Hand of God places a small figure standing in an open palm on a tall column against open sky. Antony Gormley, Barry Flanagan's hares, and Kenneth Armitage are all represented.

Reclining Figure – Arch Leg

Niki de Saint Phalle's Miss Black Power is a large, bright, deliberately confrontational figure that anchors one of the lawns, and Emile-Antoine Bourdelle's monumental bronzes hold another.

Miss Black Power by Niki de Saint Phalle

Arnaldo Pomodoro's Sfera con Sfera, a polished bronze sphere cracked open to show machined workings inside, has siblings at the United Nations and the Vatican.

La Pleureuse

François Morellet's Sphère-Trames is a lattice globe of steel rods that resolves into order from exactly one angle and looks like chaos from everywhere else.

Grande Racconto by Giuliano Vangi

Giuliano Vangi, Takao Tsuchida, and Carl Milles fill out a collection that leans twentieth century and European, with Japanese artists represented throughout.

The Hand of God by Carl Milles

The foot bath

Close by Antony Gromley

There is a natural hot spring foot bath near the far end of the site, fed from Hakone's own source, free with admission. Towels are sold for ¥100 at a vending machine.

After two hours of walking a hillside it is the best-judged thing in the museum, and it has a view across the valley while you sit.

Best time to visit

The Boxing Ones by Barry Flanagan

Open every day, which is unusual in Japan and useful if your Hakone day lands on a Monday when other museums close.

Go early. The museum opens at 09:00 and coach groups arrive from about 11:00, so the first two hours are noticeably quieter.

Seasons change the place substantially. Hydrangeas line the Tozan railway in June. Fall color peaks in mid-November and is the busiest period of the year. Winter is cold and clear with the fewest visitors, and the sculptures against snow are worth the discomfort. Summer is humid, and the shade on the upper slopes matters.

Rain is less of a problem than you would expect, since the indoor galleries and the Picasso hall absorb an hour or more.

Sfera con Sfera

Is the Hakone Open-Air Museum worth it?

Yes, and it is the strongest single attraction in Hakone.

The case against is the price, at ¥2,000 it is one of the more expensive museums in Japan, and the fact that you are paying to walk around a hillside. The case for is that the setting does something no indoor gallery can, and that the Picasso holding alone would justify a visit in most cities.

It also works for people who do not care about sculpture. Children treat it as a park with unusually good climbing equipment, and the foot bath and the views carry anyone who came along reluctantly.

How to Get to Hakone's Open-Air Museum

Fitting it into a Hakone day

Put it early, straight after arriving at Hakone-Yumoto. That gets you the quiet hours and leaves the afternoon for the ropeway and Lake Ashi, which both suffer more from bad light later in the day.

Buy a Hakone Free Pass if you are doing the loop, since it covers the transport and cuts the museum admission. More on the museum itself sits on our place page.

It opened in 1969 as Japan's first open-air museum, and the museum's background fills in how the collection was assembled.

Our guide to the Hakone Free Pass covers the transport side and the full loop in order.

For alternatives from the capital, our roundup of the best day trips in Japan compares Hakone with Nikko and Kamakura.

If you are weighing paid attractions in Tokyo instead, our piece on whether Tokyo Skytree is worth it makes a similar value argument.

A longer route such as fourteen days through Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto and Osaka gives Hakone a full overnight rather than a rushed afternoon, which is how the museum is best seen.