Ghibli Museum, Mitaka

The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, on the western edge of Tokyo, is the most charming museum in the city and one of the hardest tickets to get. Designed by Hayao Miyazaki himself and opened in 2001 at the edge of Inokashira Park, it is less a museum than a building-sized storybook: an ivy-clad, ochre-and-pastel house of spiral staircases, bridges, stained glass and tiny doors, with the motto "Let's get lost together". There is no set route, and that is deliberate. On the ground floor, a permanent exhibition explains how animation works, with zoetropes that bring Ghibli characters to life before your eyes. Upstairs, recreated studio rooms show the desks, sketches, reference books and clutter of an animator's workspace, as if Miyazaki had just stepped out. Special exhibitions change periodically. Children can climb inside a huge, plush Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro (age limits apply), and up on the rooftop garden stands the five-meter Robot Soldier from Castle in the Sky, keeping watch among the trees. The highlight for many is the Saturn Theater, where every ticket includes a screening of one of the studio's short films made exclusively for the museum and shown nowhere else in the world. A Totoro greets you at the fake ticket booth outside, the Straw Hat Cafe serves simple, homely food, and the Mamma Aiuto shop sells merchandise you will not find elsewhere. Photography is not permitted inside the building, which keeps the visit unhurried and wonderfully old-fashioned.

Tickets are the whole challenge. Admission is by advance reservation only, for a specific date and entry time, and tickets for the following month go on sale at 10am Japan time on the 10th of each month through the official sales channel run with Lawson Ticket. Popular dates — weekends, Japanese holidays and school vacations — can sell out within minutes, so prepare an account and payment details in advance, set an alarm for the release time in your own time zone, and have alternative dates ready. Prices are very modest, around a thousand yen for adults with steep reductions for children, which is partly why demand is so intense. Some tour companies sell bus packages that include a ticket, at a much higher price, and these are a fallback when direct tickets are gone. Bring the passport of the person named on the ticket. The museum is closed on Tuesdays and during periodic maintenance closures, so check the calendar before you plan around a date.

Managing expectations helps. The museum is small, and a visit takes about two hours; it is not a theme park and there are no rides. Its pleasure lies in craftsmanship and detail — the hand-painted ceilings, the light through the stained-glass windows, the animators' pencils — and in the short film, which is the one thing you cannot experience anywhere else. Fans of the films will be moved; visitors who know little of Ghibli may find it charming but slight. Note that the much larger Ghibli Park is a separate attraction in Aichi Prefecture, near Nagoya, not in Tokyo.

Getting there is part of the fun. From Mitaka Station on the JR Chuo Line, about twenty minutes from Shinjuku, a yellow community bus decorated with Ghibli characters runs to the museum, or you can walk along the tree-lined Tamagawa Josui canal in about fifteen minutes. Better still, take the Keio Inokashira Line or the Chuo Line to Kichijoji and walk through Inokashira Park, with its swan boats on the pond and the small Inokashira Benzaiten shrine, arriving at the museum on the far side. Kichijoji's lively shopping streets and cafes make an excellent lunch stop before or after your slot.