Roppongi and Midtown Illuminations

Roppongi keeps Christmas twice over, and the two displays are ten minutes apart on foot. At Roppongi Hills, the 400 metres of Keyakizaka-dori are wrapped in some 970,000 blue and white lights — the SNOW & BLUE scheme the street has kept for years — and because the avenue runs downhill towards Shiba, Tokyo Tower stands lit at the end of it. That view is why this is the most photographed illumination in the country, and why the foot of the slope is where everyone stops.

Tokyo Midtown opens its own display three weeks later, in the garden behind the complex, and rewrites the scheme each winter: a field of light worked to an original score, soap bubbles and falling snow one year, a gold-lit fir and a lit walking path the next, with an outdoor skating rink alongside that opens on 5 December and stays open to 23 February and a Christmas marché indoors. Keyakizaka is lit from 17:00 to 22:00 and the Midtown Garden from 17:00 to 23:00, and both are free to walk through, which makes the pair an evening rather than an outing.

The district fills in around them. The 66 Plaza terrace and Mohri Garden at Roppongi Hills take schemes of their own from 13 November, and the Roppongi Hills Christmas Market under the Oyane Plaza canopy — now in its twentieth year and modelled on Stuttgart's — pours gluhwein and sells German ornaments and sausages from 21 November to Christmas Day, 11:00 to 21:00. Azabudai Hills runs a second market on the same dates a short walk away, so one evening can take in three displays and two markets without boarding a train.

Go on a weekday in the second half of November or the first week of December and the slope is a pleasant walk. From around 19 December it stops being one: in 2025 Midtown warned of waits beyond two hours at the peak and put traffic controls on the approaches over the final weekends, and the Keyakizaka pavements are marshalled and kept moving. In 2026 Roppongi Hills lights Keyakizaka from 5 November and Tokyo Midtown follows on 26 November, and both Christmas displays switch off on 25 December, early by the standards of Japanese illuminations; only Midtown keeps a quieter light walk through its garden to 23 February, so this is not one to save for the new year.