Located about five minutes from Ueno Station, the museum is easy to find, surrounded by beautiful parks, the zoo, and plenty of greenery. The building itself is impressive. Unfortunately, that’s where my peaceful museum experience ended. I visited for the Van Gogh exhibition, which had timed-entry tickets. Apparently, “timed entry” simply meant joining another extremely long queue. I’ve never quite understood how an art museum manages to create so many lines, but somehow this one achieved it. Queue to enter. Queue inside. Queue to see one painting. Queue for the gift shop. Queue to leave the gift shop. At one point, I honestly wondered whether I was visiting an exhibition or participating in a national queueing championship. The crowd management didn’t help. Some staff appeared frustrated, communication wasn’t always clear, and while lockers were available (which is a nice feature), they seemed to create even more confusion. I saw several visitors arguing with staff simply because nobody seemed to know what was happening. Inside the exhibition, it was so crowded that appreciating the artwork became nearly impossible. People stopped to read every single word of every description, creating human traffic jams everywhere. Then there was the famous painting that everyone wanted to see perfectly head-on… so naturally, there was yet another queue. I was told that if I wanted the front view, I needed to line up. For a painting. Inside an exhibition. After all of that, I finished viewing the exhibition in about ten minutes. The gift shop somehow managed to continue the adventure. You could only enter after showing your exhibition ticket, and despite already being inside the museum, there was another wait of well over an hour. Once inside, it was so crowded that browsing was almost impossible, yet people were carefully queuing in places where… honestly… there didn’t seem to be any reason to queue. The museum itself is lovely, but this exhibition felt like an exercise in crowd endurance rather than art appreciation. If you’re hoping to quietly enjoy Van Gogh, I’d honestly recommend seeing his works somewhere else.

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I don’t recommend visiting the Van Gogh exhibition. It felt more like a packed Tokyo subway train than an art exhibition. It was so crowded that it was almost impossible to see the artwork. The ticket costs ¥2,000, but all I could really see were the backs of other people’s heads. The exhibition hall is quite small, and you can finish the entire exhibition in about 20 minutes.

The Van Gogh exhibit was the worst exhibition of great art I‘ve ever seen. Considering they offer timeslots the building is WAY overcrowded. It boggles my mind how anyone experienced in organizing events would consider letting this many people in at once. I recommend to avoid any exhibitions by these organizers.

I went to the Van Gogh exhibition today (a Sunday). I really wanted to enjoy the experience but I thought there were too many people admitted considering the size of the venue. It felt overly crowded to me, and that combined with the warmth of the building made me want to leave again immediately. I feel like I ended up basically just walking straight through the exhibition without stopping to look at more than about five paintings. After the exhibition you can queue for the shop. You cannot enter the shop if you don’t have an exhibition ticket. It took about 30 minutes to reach the top of the queue, and inside the shop it’s also extremely crowded and hard to move. All of the goods being sold seemed overpriced. In the end I only bought a postcard. I don’t recommend visiting the museum for the Van Gogh exhibition for anyone not good with crowds. I didn’t find the experience enjoyable. It was rather overwhelming.

We booked the tickets weeks before to see the Van Gogh exhibition. The venue was too small for such a special exhibition. We went there on Monday morning. The place was packed with people. We were unable to look at each painting. Towards the end of the section, there was in fact ONLY ONE painting that was allowed to take photo apart from the Terrace at the Cafe at Night. We have to point out that the No Photo sign was confusing. We thought we could take photos of all floral paintings on that one wall which was NOT! We were being asked to delete the photo of the other floral painting. All in all, we were very disappointed. Totally not recommended this activity included in your travel plan if you come from overseas like us.