🎌 You can buy a fridge magnet anywhere. But what if your Tokyo souvenir was you — swinging a katana, your face printed onto a T-shirt before you've even taken off the costume? That's the pitch behind a new attraction opening in central Tokyo on June 30, and the company behind it isn't a theme-park operator. It's Brother, the firm that probably made your office printer.
A printer company built a playground
Brother is not the first name that comes to mind when you think "day out in Tokyo." The Nagoya-based manufacturer is known for printers, label machines, and home sewing machines — the quietly reliable kind of products you forget you own. So a theme-park-style attraction is a swerve.
The new venue is called BROTHER JOYFACTORY TOKYO, and the name is a tell. It comes from the company's founding spirit, yukai na kojo — "the joyful factory." Brother got its start in 1908 repairing sewing machines, and the idea here is to take the machines it has spent over a century building and point them at something playful: turning a visitor's experience into a physical object on the spot.
The official theme pairs monogatari (story) with monozukuri (making, or craftsmanship) — "stories you make." You do something — become a samurai, sing, write calligraphy — and Brother's printers and sewing machines convert that moment into a keepsake before you leave: a T-shirt, a tin badge, a record sleeve, a hanging scroll, an embroidered pouch. It's tourism built around a manufacturer showing off what it makes, which is a genuinely Japanese twist on the souvenir.
The headline act: become a samurai, then wear yourself
The experience included with admission is SAMURAI LEGEND. You change into samurai dress and face a giant screen, where a master demonstrates sword forms for you to follow. Swing along, and your movements get scored — at the end, an arcade-style ranking pops up, so there's a competitive streak for anyone traveling in a group.
The clever part is what happens next. AI processes your performance into a polished, dramatic short video, handed to you as data you can post straight to friends and followers. The same system grabs a frame of your samurai self and prints it onto an original T-shirt right there. You walk in as a tourist and walk out wearing a movie poster of yourself.
Source: Brother (official site)
Sing in your own language, leave with a record
There are three more activities, each ending the same way — with something you can hold.
KARAOKE RECORD is the one that made people sit up. Built with JOYSOUND, the commercial karaoke system run by Xing, it puts you in a recording-studio booth to sing J-pop or anime tracks. Here's the trick: you can sing in your own language, and the system maps your voice onto the Japanese lyrics while keeping your actual voice, then nudges your pitch onto key. The result sounds like a polished studio take, and you take it home as audio plus a custom record sleeve.
SHODO STAGE is calligraphy, but staged as immersive theater. Brother runs it on ROOMDIVE, an in-development system that fills the room with projected visuals, music, and scent. You write with water rather than ink on the brush, and the system reads your strokes accurately enough that previewers came away surprised. Your finished character can then be foil-printed, made into a hanging scroll, or embroidered.
SEWING STUDIO is the most hands-on. You pick from colorful Japanese-pattern fabrics and use a Brother sewing machine to stitch a drawstring pouch or small bag. This is the company quietly flexing its origin story — a sewing-machine maker letting beginners feel the satisfaction of finishing something themselves.
Whatever you make across the activities funnels into CREATE KOBO, a workshop area where the images, audio, and designs you generated get turned into the final goods — badges, mugs, tote bags, T-shirts, even pressed records. One of a kind, by definition.
Not just a tourist trap — a business experiment
There's a second, less obvious reason this place exists. Brother describes JOYFACTORY as a two-purpose, next-generation facility: it's an attraction, but it's also a live showcase to test whether "experience plus instant merchandise" works as a business it can sell to others. The plan is to collaborate with tourist sites, IP holders, and event organizers, and potentially export the model.
The creative pedigree backs that ambition. The experience team includes Shinji Aramaki, the director behind anime like Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 and Ultraman, who handled visual direction, and Shintaro Kojima, a former producer on Capcom's Monster Hunter series, who supervised the game-like elements. Generative-AI and interactive-experience specialists rounded out the build, one of them a researcher from a University of Tokyo lab. That's a lot of firepower for a printer demo — which is rather the point. Brother is using a Tokyo storefront to argue that a hardware company can sell moments, not just machines.
If you want to go
The practical details, for anyone planning a Tokyo trip:
BROTHER JOYFACTORY TOKYO opens June 30, 2026, inside the Brother Tokyo Showroom at 3-3-8 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku — a short walk from Kyobashi, Ginza-itchome, and Takaracho stations, right by Ginza. It runs 1:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., last entry 7:00 p.m., closed Wednesdays and on select company days.
Admission is ¥8,800 (about $55), which covers the SAMURAI LEGEND experience and your original T-shirt. Each additional activity is ¥4,950 (about $31). Tickets are sold through the experience-booking site GetYourGuide, so you can reserve before you fly.
It isn't cheap for an afternoon, and that's a fair thing to weigh — you're paying for a custom object and a video, not just an entrance. But as a way to leave Japan with proof you held a sword and recorded a song, it's hard to file under "generic gift shop."
Plenty of countries sell experiences, and plenty sell souvenirs. Fewer hand you both at once, made by the machines the company is famous for. Does anywhere near you turn a factory's own technology into a day out — and would you rather come home with a mass-made magnet, or a slightly ridiculous T-shirt of yourself as a samurai?
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