Things to Do in Kawasaki: A Local Guide to the City
TripToJapan.com Editorial Team
Aug 24, 2026
Contents
TripToJapan.com Editorial Team
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This is the reason most visitors come. The Fujiko F. Fujio Museum is dedicated to the creator of Doraemon, the robot cat from the 22nd century who has been a fixture of Japanese childhood since 1969.
Inside are original hand-drawn manga pages, his studio recreated desk by desk, a reading room holding his complete works, and a short original film shown in the museum's own theater. The rooftop has life-size character statues, including the vacant lot with the concrete pipes that every Doraemon reader recognizes.
Practical details, because this one has rules:
Tickets are not sold at the door. Buy in advance at any Lawson convenience store using the Loppi machine, or through an authorized agency before you travel
Entry is by timed slot: 10:00, 12:00, 14:00 or 16:00
¥1,000 for adults and university students, ¥700 for middle and high school students, ¥500 for children four and over, free under four
Open 10:00 to 18:30, closed Tuesdays and over New Year
Get to Noborito Station on the Odakyu or JR Nanbu line, then take the Doraemon-liveried shuttle bus, about 10 minutes for ¥220
Allow two hours. The audio guide is included and is in English, and it carries a lot of the exhibit, since most of the panels are in Japanese only.
Kawasaki Daishi, properly Heiken-ji, was founded in 1128 and is one of the three temples that draw the largest New Year crowds in the country, roughly three million visitors over the first three days of January.
The rest of the year it is calm and free to enter. The approach street, Omotesando, is lined with sweet shops selling tontoko-ame, a hard candy cut with a rhythmic three-knife chopping that you hear before you see. The Daishi is known for yakuyoke, protection against misfortune, which is why people come at turning points in their lives.
It is on the Keikyu Daishi Line, three stops and about five minutes from Keikyu Kawasaki Station.
This is the most underrated thing in the city. Nihon Minkaen is 25 traditional buildings, thatched farmhouses, a kabuki stage, a water mill, a merchant's house, dismantled from villages across Japan and rebuilt on a wooded hillside in Ikuta Ryokuchi park.
You walk inside them. Many have an irori hearth lit in the cooler months, and the smoke that cures the thatch also makes the interiors smell right in a way no reconstruction usually manages. Admission is ¥550 for adults and ¥330 for students, and it is closed on Mondays.
It is a 13-minute walk from Mukogaoka-Yuen Station on the Odakyu line, which is one stop from Noborito, so it pairs naturally with the Doraemon museum on the same day.
Taro Okamoto was born in Kawasaki, trained in Paris in the 1930s, and spent his career attacking the idea that Japanese art should be restrained. His Tower of the Sun still stands at the site of Expo '70 in Osaka, and his mural Myth of Tomorrow hangs in Shibuya Station, seen by hundreds of thousands of commuters who mostly do not look up.
The museum sits in the same Ikuta Ryokuchi park as Nihon Minkaen, which makes a sensible pairing: farmhouses in the morning, and then Japan's postwar art at its loudest in the afternoon. It is closed on Mondays.
Taro Okamoto is worth reading about before you go. The work makes more sense when you know he was arguing with the entire Japanese aesthetic tradition rather than working inside it.
Note that the Kawasaki City Museum, in Todoroki Ryokuchi, is no longer open. Its storage vaults flooded during Typhoon Hagibis in October 2019 and the building has since closed for good. The collection now appears in pop-up exhibitions at other venues around the city and online.
The industrial waterfront is the city's most distinctive attraction and the one nobody expects.
Kawasaki's Keihin coast is a dense band of refineries, chemical plants and steelworks, and at night the pipework is lit up like a circuit board. Kojo yakei, factory night viewing, became a genuine hobby in Japan around 2007, and Kawasaki is where it started.
Boat tours run from Higashi-Ogishima and the Kawasaki waterfront, typically 90 minutes to two hours, mostly in the evening and mostly at weekends. Some operators run bus tours to viewing points instead if you would rather stay on land. Book ahead; the boats are small and the winter sailings sell out.
On the first Sunday in April, Kanayama Shrine in Kawasaki-ku holds the Kanamara Matsuri, the festival of the steel phallus. Three portable shrines are carried through the streets, one of them bright pink, and the imagery is exactly what the name suggests.
The shrine has historic associations with fertility, safe childbirth, and protection from sexually transmitted disease, and the festival raises money for HIV research. It is free, it is family-attended and good-humored rather than lewd, and it is extremely crowded. Arrive by 09:00 if you want to see anything, and be respectful; this is a working shrine, not a spectacle staged for visitors.
Yomiuriland straddles the Kawasaki border and is a full-size amusement park with a good roller coaster, a winter illumination that runs from October to April, and a factory-tour ride through a Nissin instant-noodle line.
Lazona Kawasaki Plaza, attached to Kawasaki Station, is one of the larger shopping complexes in the Tokyo area, with an outdoor plaza that hosts free performances at weekends.
Cinecitta, in the Kawasaki-ku entertainment district, is a cinema complex with the kind of sound systems film people travel for.
Kawasaki Frontale, the football club, play at Todoroki Stadium and have one of the more entertaining matchday atmospheres in the J.League.
Kawasaki also has one of the country's largest Korean communities in the Sakuramoto area, and the Japanese-Korean food there is the best eating in the city.
JR Kawasaki Station is 18 minutes from Tokyo Station on the Tokaido Line and about 10 minutes from Yokohama. Keikyu Kawasaki, a few minutes' walk away, connects to Haneda Airport in around 20 minutes, which makes the city an easy first or last stop on a trip.
The sites are spread across three separate rail lines, so plan the day around one cluster. Noborito and Mukogaoka-Yuen on the Odakyu line cover the Doraemon museum, Nihon Minkaen and the Taro Okamoto museum. Kawasaki Station covers the temple, the waterfront and the shopping.
An IC card handles every line here. For a longer trip, a first Tokyo itinerary that already includes Yokohama can absorb a Kawasaki morning without changing hotels.
April for the Kanamara Matsuri and the cherry blossoms along the Tama River. Winter for the factory cruise, when cold air makes the lights sharper and the steam plumes bigger.
The first three days of January are the one time to avoid Kawasaki Daishi unless the crowd is the point. Weekday visits to the Doraemon museum are noticeably quieter than weekends, and Mondays close both museums in Ikuta Ryokuchi.
Kawasaki sits in Tokyo's southern sprawl and shares its weather: hot and humid from July to September, cold and dry from December to February, with the pleasant stretches in April and late October.
For more on the city and its surroundings, see our Kawasaki area guide, and if what draws you here is the older Japan preserved at Nihon Minkaen, our piece on samurai and geisha traditions covers the world those farmhouses belonged to.
Street art has also spread through the Nakahara and Tama wards in recent years, with murals around the station districts that are worth a detour if you are walking between sites anyway.
