Tokyo Discovery Guide

Tokyo is the largest city on earth and the most orderly, and the combination is the whole point.

Thirty-seven million people in the metropolitan area, a rail network that runs to the second, and almost no litter or crime — and inside that, a density of small, obsessive, specialised places that exists nowhere else: a bar with six seats, a shop selling only one kind of knife, a man who has made the same tempura for forty years.

It has more Michelin stars than any other city and also the best cheap food anywhere.

And because almost everything was destroyed twice in the twentieth century, Tokyo is not a historic city so much as a constantly rebuilt one — which is why a wooden temple, a 1960s expressway and a new tower sit on the same block without anyone finding it odd.

The two old quarters

Asakusa for Senso-ji, the city’s oldest temple, and the shopping street leading to it; Yanaka, one of the few areas to survive both the earthquake and the bombing, with wooden houses, a cemetery and a shopping street that feels like a different decade.

The modern city

Shibuya’s crossing and the view down onto it; Shinjuku for the skyscrapers, the free observation deck at the government building, and the tiny bars of Golden Gai; Ginza for the department stores and their extraordinary food halls in the basement.

Food

A depachika basement food hall, a standing sushi counter, a ramen shop where you order from a vending machine, and an izakaya in a railway arch.

Quiet

The Meiji shrine’s forest, the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, and Rikugien or Koishikawa Korakuen for classical gardens.

Day trips

Nikko, Kamakura and Hakone, all under two hours.

Tokyo runs on consideration for other people, expressed as rules that nobody states.

Public and private

The distinction between how one behaves in public and what one actually thinks is a structural feature of Japanese social life, not hypocrisy. The result in Tokyo is a public realm of extraordinary calm — silent trains, no litter, no shouting — and a private realm, in bars and homes and karaoke rooms, that is far less restrained.

Craft and obsession

There is enormous respect for doing one thing extremely well for a very long time. It produces the forty-year tempura chef, the shop selling only rice scoops, and a general standard of execution — in food, service, packaging, transport — that visitors find hard to readjust from.

Neighbourhood

Tokyo is a collection of former villages around stations, each with its own character, and residents identify with theirs.

Newness

Buildings are routinely demolished after thirty or forty years. There is no preservation instinct of the European kind, which is part of why the city is so modern and so restless.

Follow the rules, which are mostly unwritten. Do not eat or drink while walking, do not talk on the phone on a train, queue where the marks on the platform tell you to, and keep your voice down. None of this is enforced; all of it is noticed.

Carry your rubbish. Public bins are rare, and the expectation is that you take waste home and sort it. Convenience stores have bins for what you bought there.

Overtourism is now a real issue. Some neighbourhoods have put up signs asking visitors not to photograph residents or block private lanes; Kyoto has gone further. Behave as a guest in a residential area, because that is what most of Tokyo is.

Tattoos may exclude you from public baths and gyms; ask, or use a private onsen.

Use the trains rather than taxis, which are expensive and slower.

Late March to early April is cherry blossom, and it is genuinely worth arranging a trip around — the city parks fill with people eating under the trees for the week or so it lasts. It is also the busiest and most expensive time.

October and November are the best months overall: dry, mild, clear, with autumn colour in the gardens through late November and very little rain.

May is pleasant, though the Golden Week holidays at the start of it fill everything.

June to mid-July is tsuyu, the rainy season — humid and grey.

Late July and August are hot and extremely humid, above 33°C with no relief at night, and typhoon season runs into September.

December to February is cold, dry and very clear, with the best chance of seeing Mount Fuji from the city.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the city

Tokyo has a reputation for expense that is now largely out of date. Transport, casual food and convenience-store meals are cheap, and a very good bowl of ramen costs less than a sandwich in most European capitals. Accommodation is the expensive part.