GREEN×EXPO 2027 Yokohama: Tickets, Access & When to Go

On the morning of 19 March 2027, a stretch of land on Yokohama’s western edge that spent seventy years behind a military fence opens to the public for the first time — and it opens with roughly 600 cherry trees, across about 40 varieties, in bloom. That timing is not an accident. The organisers set opening day squarely inside the Kanto cherry blossom window, which effectively poses a question to anyone travelling to Japan in spring 2027: does one of your hanami days belong here?

The event’s formal name is the International Horticultural Exhibition 2027, Yokohama; the brand you’ll see everywhere is GREEN×EXPO 2027. It carries AIPH’s top A1 classification, the highest tier of international horticultural exposition — and Japan hasn’t hosted one at this level since the 1990 Osaka Flower Expo, thirty-seven years earlier.

One thing shapes your whole plan, so it goes near the top: this is an expo built entirely around reservations. Buying a ticket is only the first step. Your entry date and time slot must be booked, the shuttle bus must be booked, and if you drive, so must your parking space. Those booking systems all open on 18 September 2026. Below: what to see, when to go, which ticket to buy, which of the four stations to use, and the order to do it all in.

What’s actually on show

The site sits on the border of Yokohama’s Asahi and Seya wards, on the former Kamiseya Communication Facility — a 242-hectare former US military installation, of which the expo occupies about 100 hectares. Decades of restricted access left it largely undeveloped, so it still holds farmland, grassland, river headwaters and the valley terrain locals call yato. For an expo about plants, that’s a genuine stage rather than turf rolled out for the occasion.

The theme translates as “Scenery of the Future for Happiness,” with the English brand line “Bloom of Future.” If you went to the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo, reset your expectations: that was fast, queue-heavy and technology-forward. This one is slow — gardens, flower fields, horticultural craft, food and farming. The closest honest comparison is spending a day inside an enormous, unusually ambitious botanical garden.

The exhibit zones here are called Villages — twelve of them, each built collaboratively by companies and organisations as a whole streetscape of gardens, displays and hands-on spaces rather than a single building apiece. The organisers’ own flagship is the Horticultural Pavilion, with design supervised by architect Kengo Kuma, showing traditional Japanese ornamental plants and bonsai handed down since the Edo period, alongside recreations of the daily life of Edo-era nurserymen. For an overseas visitor, that’s the part of the site you can’t see anywhere else.

There’s also a quieter thread worth watching: material reuse. Timber from the Grand Ring at the Osaka-Kansai Expo has been brought to Yokohama for reuse, and structural material from the Japan Pavilion at Dubai 2020 and Osaka’s Women’s Pavilion is being worked into indoor exhibition buildings. Some of what you’ll walk through is the skeleton of a previous world’s fair.

When you go changes what you see

The run covers spring, summer and early autumn, and planting is rotated deliberately through the traditional seasonal calendar. Which month you pick is the main variable in what you’ll actually see.

Which ticket to buy

There are more ticket types than you need. In practice an overseas visitor is choosing between three. Prices are in yen, tax included. Age is counted as of 1 April 2027 (for March visits, as of 1 April 2026), and children aged three and under enter free without a ticket.

If you’re going once, the answer is simple: the advance one-day ticket, which saves an adult ¥600 and stays on sale right up to 18 March 2027. The two things to watch are that a paper ticket costs ¥100 extra, and that buying the ticket doesn’t finish the job — the date and time slot is a separate booking, covered next.

The night ticket deserves more attention than it gets. At ¥3,500 you get four and a half hours, which suits anyone already spending the day in central Yokohama and wanting only the illuminated gardens in the evening. In midsummer it’s arguably the only comfortable way to visit. The passes only make sense if you live in the Kanto region.

The trap: there are four layers of booking

Most people assume a ticket gets you through the gate. Not here. To manage traffic around the site, entry date and time, shuttle buses and parking are all reservation-only — and all three booking systems open on 18 September 2026. Do them in this order and nothing goes wrong.

Getting to the site

This is the part worth three minutes of your attention. The venue sits inland, roughly ten kilometres west of Yokohama Station, with no train line running into it. Everyone takes a train to one of four nearby stations, then transfers to a shuttle bus. Those four stations belong to three different railway companies, so the site is approachable from the Sotetsu, Tokyu and JR networks alike — you simply pick whichever suits the line you’re already on.

The shuttle costs ¥200 for adults and ¥100 for children each way, running roughly 8:30–22:30 (from an hour before opening to an hour after close). Again: book it in advance. Note that closer doesn’t mean faster — Minami-machida and Mitsukyo are both about four kilometres out, yet the ride differs by five minutes because of routing and traffic lights. The number that actually matters is how long it takes to reach that station from where you’re staying.

From Tokyo, Narita and Haneda

Staying in central Tokyo, the cleanest run is the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line straight to Minami-machida Grandberry Park. Staying in Yokohama or anywhere on the Sotetsu line, Seya is barely a decision. From Haneda, go to Yokohama Station and change to Sotetsu; from Narita, take the Narita Express or a limousine bus to Yokohama Station (YCAT) and change there. Arriving from Kansai or Nagoya on the day, get off at Shin-Yokohama and take the JR Yokohama Line to Tokaichiba — our shinkansen guide and guide to reserving shinkansen seats cover the booking side.

All three railways accept IC cards, and the shuttles use standard route-bus vehicles. If you don’t have a card yet, see our guide to Welcome Suica. Most on-site spending accepts cards and digital payment, though smaller stalls may still want cash — our note on how much cash to bring to Japan gives sensible numbers.

Walking, cycling and driving

An official walking route exists only from Seya Station, about two kilometres. The other three stations expect you to take the shuttle. In summer, or with children or older travellers, don’t be a hero even from Seya. There’s parking for around 1,700 bicycles beside the venue plus expanded share-cycle ports, which suits anyone staying locally. If you drive, on-site parking runs about ¥5,000 on weekdays and ¥7,000 on weekends and peak dates (Golden Week and September weekends and holidays), with park-and-ride lots at about ¥3,000 during peak periods only. Add the mandatory reservation, and driving rarely wins unless you’re splitting it several ways.

On the day

Gates are open 9:30 to 21:30 — twelve hours, though you don’t need all of them. The site runs to about a hundred hectares and walking every zone is genuine work, so it’s more useful to decide in advance whether you’re here for the exhibits or the gardens, and concentrate in that direction. Indoor highlights like the Horticultural Pavilion sit well around the middle of the day, when both the heat and the crowd peak outside.

Japanese guides are blunt about footwear, and they’re right: wear shoes you can walk in. There’s a great deal of grass and unpaved path here. A suitcase is close to unusable; a backpack is the right call. Treat a summer visit as an outdoor event — hat, water, sunscreen, and cooling gear if you have it, because shade is scarcer than at a typical city attraction. Rain still leaves indoor exhibits open, but operations in severe weather follow the organisers’ same-day announcements.

There are information desks, an accessibility centre and childcare facilities on site, and the organisers have published accessibility guidelines covering wheelchair users, families with strollers and older visitors. Details on loan equipment and facility numbers are still being released.

Is it worth a dedicated day?

Honestly: if plants, gardens and architecture aren’t your thing and you have five days in Japan, a full day out here probably isn’t the best use of one of them. It’s a distance from central Tokyo, it needs a transfer, and it needs bookings.

Three kinds of traveller should go anyway. If you’re already coming for cherry blossoms in spring 2027, the opening period pairs 600 flowering trees with international garden design in a way nothing else in Kanto does. If you care about horticulture, bonsai or garden design, the Kengo Kuma-supervised Horticultural Pavilion and the Edo horticultural material are the real substance of this expo, not decoration. And if you’re travelling with children, this is a place they can run around in all day — far kinder than a queue-based world’s fair.

For itinerary building, treat this and central Yokohama as two separate days rather than forcing them together. For a base, judge by transfer convenience: Yokohama Station, Shin-Yokohama, or somewhere on the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line all work, since the area around the venue is residential and has no hotel cluster. The run spans Golden Week and the summer holidays, and Kanto accommodation tightens hard in both — once your dates are fixed, book.

Frequently asked questions