Takanawa Gateway City and the Museum of Narratives
Tuesday 15 September 2026
Takanawa Gateway is the newest station on the Yamanote line — opened in 2020 under a Kengo Kuma roof of timber and white membrane — and the city being built around it still features cranes. From the elevated deck at noon the station roof folds away below, and across the road there’s a building site the size of several city blocks. The station itself is bold and new, with loads of open space and a bar or two. It also features a small, unmanned konbini, called “Touch to Go” – it is a similar concept to Amazon Go in Seattle.
The lack of rubbish bins is always a hot topic for visitors to Tokyo. Takanawa’s answer is a small robot with cartoon eyes that trundles about the deck so people can put their rubbish in it.
Inside the NEWoMan building, on the quieter higher floors, The City Bakery on the fifth floor has its name painted a dozen times in white on royal blue. Looking in the window, it looks like they are baking on site here in a commercial kitchen and supplying other locations. The coffee is okay, but not exceptional. It’s fine for the first iced latte of the day. Prior to the lunch rush, it’s relatively quiet and it seems that most tourists don’t venture this far – the fifth floor is quite food outlet oriented.
Verve Coffee – tricky to find as it’s on the opposite side of the building to the station – does an iced latte with a card explaining the beans and some light meals. Verve Coffee is popular and can be extremely busy – I went outside of the busy times and got a table quite easily. It’s okay for the second iced latte of the morning, but again not exceptional.
The building worth coming for is MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, also by Kuma, which opened on 28 March this year. It’s a spiral of stacked terraces planted like a hillside. Entry is free — the special exhibitions have their own fees. The gallery corridor has a giant unfurling fern frond printed on the wall. Internal escalators and lifts take people between floors, but you can achieve the same without the crowds by using the external spiral walkway that curves around the building.
On the roof is MoN Farm — raised beds, gravel paths, a bench among the saplings, and a sign explaining that it is “not merely a plantation for growing crops, but an experimental field”. In one corner there’s a small shrine with its own red torii. There’s also a rooftop footbath, which I would have used if I’d remembered to put my hand towel in my bag this morning. Instead, I spot Shinkansen going in and out below — the roof looks straight down over the tracks. Ideal spot for trainspotting!
