Tokyo on a rainy day: the best indoor things to do 🇯🇵

Tokyo is a brilliant rainy-day city — a place where you can spend hours indoors and never run out of things to do. When the rain sets in, these covered sights keep you dry without slowing the fun.

Head up above the weather at the Tokyo Skytree, whose indoor observation decks give you the city (and, on lucky days, a break in the cloud) from behind glass, with a shopping-and-aquarium complex at its base to fill the rest of a wet afternoon. The classic Tokyo Tower offers the same dry lookout in a more retro package, with playful indoor exhibits kids enjoy.

Then lose a rainy day happily in Akihabara, where the multi-storey arcades, game centres and gadget malls are made for exactly this weather — warm, loud, roofed and endlessly diverting. It is the most fun you can have in Tokyo without ever stepping back outside.

Beyond these three, Tokyo shelters you better than almost any city: the vast department-store food halls and underground shopping streets around the big stations let you eat, browse and wander for hours without an umbrella, and the city’s world-class museums make a natural wet-weather plan. A rainy day is also a fine time for a long, steamy bowl of ramen at a counter. Each guide below has opening hours, ticket details and the honest verdict, so you can plan a dry Tokyo day that never feels like a compromise.

One planning note: Tokyo is arguably the world’s best rainy-day city, so a wet forecast barely dents your plans. The station complexes — Tokyo, Shinjuku, Shibuya — hide entire underground cities of shops, food halls and cafes you can explore without an umbrella, and they connect directly to the trains. Keep the Skytree and towers for a break in the cloud, save the arcades of Akihabara for the heaviest downpours, and enjoy a steaming bowl of ramen while it pours outside.