Roppongi and Midtown Illuminations
けやき坂イルミネーション／MIDTOWN CHRISTMAS
Early November 2026 – Late December 2026
Tokyo
The dates for this event have not been confirmed yet. They are an estimate from the event’s own pattern, and this page is updated as soon as the organiser announces the real ones — check the official site for the latest. Last held 4 November – 25 December 2025.
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 930,000 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 a week or so 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 stays open into late February and a Christmas marché indoors. Both Christmas displays run 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 at Roppongi Hills takes a scheme of its own, and the Roppongi Hills Christmas Market under the Oyane Plaza canopy — a fixture for close to twenty years and modelled on Stuttgart's — pours gluhwein and sells German ornaments and sausages from late November to Christmas Day. 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: Midtown warns of waits beyond two hours at the peak and puts traffic controls on the approaches over the final weekends, and the Keyakizaka pavements are marshalled and kept moving. The Christmas displays switch off on 25 December, early by the standards of Japanese illuminations; only Midtown keeps a quieter light walk through its garden into late February, so this is not one to save for the new year.