The mistake most first-time visitors make in Tokyo is treating it as a list of sights joined by train rides. You end up with a day that reads Meiji Shrine, Shibuya crossing, Tokyo Skytree, Senso-ji — four dots on a map twelve kilometres apart, connected by ninety minutes underground, and a memory that is mostly platforms.
The city rewards the opposite approach. Tokyo is not one downtown with suburbs attached. It is a couple of dozen former villages that grew into each other along the rail lines, and each of them still has its own centre of gravity: its own station, its own shopping street, its own idea of what an evening looks like. Pick a district, walk it for half a day, eat where you end up, and the specifics start to accumulate. Do that three or four times and you will know Tokyo better than someone who spent the same fortnight ticking off landmarks.
This guide is organised the way the city is: by neighbourhood. Each entry says what the area is good for, roughly when to go, and whether it is worth basing yourself there. Nothing here needs to be booked or timed to the minute.
How to choose where to stay
Before the walking, the practical decision. Where you sleep in Tokyo matters less than people fear and more than the maps suggest, and the single variable that matters is the Yamanote line — the loop that circles central Tokyo and intersects almost every other line at some point.
Stay within a five-minute walk of a Yamanote station and a typical journey drops from forty minutes to twenty. Stay twelve minutes from a station on a single branch line and every outing acquires an extra change and a stretch of walking at both ends. Over ten days that difference is measured in hours.
| Base | Suits | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Shinjuku | Late nights, transport in every direction | Loud, and the station is genuinely confusing |
| Shibuya | First-time visitors who want the energy nearby | Expensive, crowded from mid-morning |
| Ueno / Nippori | Value, direct airport access, old-Tokyo walks | Quieter evenings, fewer restaurants open late |
| Kanda / Akihabara | Central, cheap business hotels, easy transfers | Almost entirely offices after dark |
| Ebisu / Nakameguro | Eating well, calmer streets, adult evenings | Further from Asakusa and the north |
Nippori is worth singling out. It sits on the Yamanote loop and on the Skyliner line from Narita, so an arriving traveller can be off the plane and standing in their hotel lobby in under an hour, which is not true of most of the city.
Yanaka: the Tokyo that survived
Yanaka is the answer to the question people ask on day three, which is where the old city went. Most of it burned — in the 1923 earthquake, and then again in the firebombing of 1945. Yanaka came through both, which is why the streets here are narrow and slightly crooked, the houses are wooden and two storeys high, and the shopping street has almost no chain stores in it.
Walk it in the morning, before ten, when the shops are opening and the light comes down the slope. Yanaka Ginza, the main shopping street, is a few hundred metres of butchers, pickle shops, senbei grills and one very famous set of steps at the western end. Buy something and eat it standing up; that is what the street is for.
The cemetery beside it sounds like an odd recommendation and is not. It is a large, quiet, tree-filled grid of paths where the neighbourhood walks its dogs, and it is full of cats who have clearly decided that the arrangement suits them. From there it is a fifteen-minute walk south into Nezu, where the shrine has a small tunnel of vermilion torii gates. It costs nothing, and there is no queue, which is a sentence you will not read about the more famous version in Kyoto.
Shimokitazawa: second-hand everything
Twelve minutes from Shibuya on the Keio Inokashira line, and a completely different city. Shimokitazawa is low-rise, largely pedestrian, and built around second-hand clothing, records, tiny theatres and a density of coffee shops that would embarrass most European capitals.
Afternoons are the right time. The vintage shops open late — many not until noon or one — and the streets stay calm until early evening, when the drinking starts and the alleys south of the station fill up. It is one of the few parts of Tokyo where wandering without a destination is the correct strategy, because the shops are small, numerous, and impossible to distinguish from a map.
If you are buying clothes, know that Japanese vintage pricing is graded on condition with some precision, and that the cheap racks are usually at the back or on a lower floor.
Kagurazaka: the quiet slope
A hillside north-west of the Imperial Palace, laid out along one main slope with stone-paved alleys running off it. Kagurazaka was a geisha district; a handful of the old wooden ryotei buildings are still there behind sliding gates, invisible unless you are looking.
What makes it unusual now is the French population. The Institut français sits at the top of the hill, a French school operates nearby, and the result is an improbable concentration of bakeries, wine bars and bistros sharing lanes with soba shops and a Zen temple. It works far better than it sounds.
Go in the evening. The alleys are lit low, the restaurants seat six or eight people, and the whole district takes about ninety minutes to walk properly, which leaves time to eat in it.
Kiyosumi and Kuramae: across the river
The eastern bank of the Sumida was warehouses and workshops, and much of it still looks the part — flat, low, gridded, with wide streets and loading bays. Over the past fifteen years the warehouses have filled with coffee roasters, leather workshops, small-batch stationery makers and one of the city's better contemporary art museums.
Kuramae is the more walkable half, roughly between Asakusa and the river, and it is where to go if you want to buy something made by the person who sold it to you. Kiyosumi, twenty minutes south, has the coffee and the garden.
Kiyosumi Garden deserves a paragraph on its own. It is a strolling garden built around a pond, with a path of stepping stones set just above the water so that the whole circuit is made slightly precarious on purpose. It receives a fraction of the visitors that the famous gardens do, and on a weekday morning you may have most of it to yourself.
Shibuya and Ebisu: the obvious one, done properly
Cross the scramble once. Stand on the walkway outside the station, take the photograph, do the crossing, and then leave — because the interesting parts of Shibuya are all within ten minutes of it and almost nobody walks to them.
Nonbei Yokocho, a two-lane strip of drinking shacks squeezed against the railway, holds about forty bars with four seats each. Uphill to the south-west, Daikanyama is low-rise, expensive and pleasant, with a bookshop complex that stays open late and is genuinely worth the walk. One stop further, Ebisu has the highest concentration of good restaurants per street in central Tokyo without any of Shibuya's crowd, and it is where a lot of people who work in Shibuya go to eat.
Nakameguro, along the canal, completes the set. In April the cherry trees along the water draw enormous crowds; for the other eleven months it is a calm, low-key stretch of shops and coffee.
Shinjuku after dark
Shinjuku is worth a night rather than a day. The station handles more passengers than any other in the world and is laid out accordingly, so allow the first attempt to go badly and use a specific exit number rather than a compass direction.
What you want is east of the station: Omoide Yokocho, a lane of grilled-skewer counters under the tracks, and Golden Gai, six alleys of bars the size of a garden shed. Many Golden Gai bars have a cover charge, and a few are members-only or plainly signal that they would rather not have tourists — take the hint and try the next door along. There are more than two hundred of them.
To the west, Shinjuku Gyoen is one of the largest gardens in central Tokyo, a genuine relief in July and the best single place in the city to sit down.
Day trips that earn the train fare
Tokyo has three excursions that genuinely justify a full day, and they are different enough that most people only want one or two.
Kamakura, an hour south on the Yokosuka line, is a former capital reduced to a seaside town full of temples, with walking trails linking them across the wooded ridges behind. There is a large bronze Buddha, a bamboo grove at Hokoku-ji, and a beach at the end of it. Go on a weekday if you can; the Enoden tram line along the coast is charming and completely overwhelmed at weekends.
Nikko, two hours north, is the other kind of day: a mountain valley of cedar forest, a lavishly carved shrine complex that is unlike anything else in Japan, and a lake and waterfall on the plateau above if you have the time to keep going. Autumn colour here arrives earlier than in the city.
Yokohama is only thirty minutes away and is a real city rather than an attraction — a waterfront, the largest Chinatown in Japan, and a museum devoted entirely to regional ramen, which is either the best or the worst idea you have heard today.
Eating, and how the counters work
Tokyo's food culture runs on specialisation. A shop makes one thing. It has made that thing for thirty years, it has eight seats, and the person making it learned from the person who owned it before. This is why a nine-seat ramen counter can be worth queueing for and a large restaurant with a photo menu usually is not.
A few mechanics that make the first days easier. Many small restaurants take orders through a vending machine at the door: put in cash, press the button for what you want, hand the ticket over the counter. Queues form outside, not inside, and they move quickly because nobody lingers. When you finish, you leave — the seat is needed and everyone in the queue knows exactly how long you have been sitting in it. Tipping does not exist and attempting it causes confusion.
Lunch is the value meal in Tokyo. Restaurants that are expensive at dinner often run a set lunch at a third of the price, which is how you eat well in Ginza without spending what Ginza usually costs.
Putting it together
Three neighbourhoods properly is a better week than eight neighbourhoods glimpsed. A pattern that works for five days in the city: one old-Tokyo day walking Yanaka and Nezu into Ueno, one west-side day in Shimokitazawa ending in Ebisu, one east-side day in Kuramae and Kiyosumi with the evening in Asakusa, one day trip, and one day left deliberately empty for whatever you found and want to go back to.
For the trip as a whole, see the complete Japan travel guide; for how Tokyo fits into a fortnight, the 14-day Japan itinerary; and for the city's own page, the Tokyo destination guide.
