Christmas lights in Tokyo are pretty special and some of them are pretty extravagant. There are at least a dozen venues in Tokyo that put on some type of Christmas light display or show. I'd never seen one before so I decided to visit two of the larger displays. The first is at the Caretta Shiodome while the second was at Tokyo Midtown. While the Japanese don't celebrate Christmas in a religious sense, they have made it a special time of year for family and shopping, just like many other cultures.
They have also developed some Christmas traditions like confessing your love on Christmas Eve, to have a Kentucky Fried Chicken Christmas dinner, and of course Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without have strawberry shortcake (aka Christmas cake) with those delicious Japanese strawberries.
Caretta Shiodome
The Christmas light display here was amongst the first I found out about years ago. When I finally managed to see it in person, it was very fancy, still very large, but somehow felt a little smaller than I expected. It was really pretty, with colour shifting lights, and a wintry castle theme. You can tell that it is pretty large as you can see the shadows of people wandering through the lights.
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| White lights |
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| Changed to blue lights |
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| Shiodome buildings |
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| The Christmas lights from above. The large white tent cone/tree was where you could have special commemorative photos taken if you wanted to pay for it. |
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| A world of blue |
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| Lots of lights |
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| Just very pretty. |
Tokyo Midtown
This place is the big extravaganza of Christmas displays as they light up the trees along the roads around this giant building complex and the whole park behind the building is one giant animated light display synchronized to music. The display occupies some 2000 square metres, and has over 500,000 LEDs to celebrate 10 years of light shows.
There were a ton of people here to enjoy the Tokyo Midtown Starlight Garden 2017. There were so many people you had to walk through the displays in one
direction and there were plenty of staff to make sure people went the
right way.
The Starlight Garden basically took you through the solar system from the planets to the sun, changing colours, have comets shoot through, and showing a big finale with the sun. It was big production that was amazing and all for free. The show cycled every 10 minutes or so it seemed and you could pick a spot or spots to watch it from multiple times.
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| The trees along the drive |
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| The field of stars. |
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| There are changes all the time and flows of light. |
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| Colour change! |
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| The big planet, the heart of the display. Tokyo Tower in the background. |
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| Towards the sun. |
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| The big finale. |
Great lights. If I was living there I'd probably be out more than a few nights to catch all the different Christmas displays!
More travelogue posts here.
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