Tokyo, Japan

Updated 2026-08-19 · 8 min read · Written by the PoppaTrip editors

Learn one green loop and the whole city opens

Tokyo looks impossible on a map. Thirteen million people, twenty-three wards, a subway diagram that resembles spilled spaghetti, and no centre — no single downtown that everything else is a suburb of. Visitors arrive braced for a struggle.

And then, within about a day, it turns out to be the easiest big city in the world to move around, because of one train line. The Yamanote loop runs in a rough circle and strings together nearly everywhere you want to go: Shinjuku, Harajuku, Shibuya, Tokyo Station, Akihabara, Ueno. It comes every few minutes. It is announced in English. You tap in with a card you bought at the airport and stop thinking about tickets for the rest of your trip.

So plan by neighbourhood, not by attraction. Each district here is its own small city with its own volume and its own smell, and the pleasure is picking one, walking it until it runs out, eating there, and getting back on the loop. Chasing famous names across the map is how people end up spending a week on trains and remembering nothing.

Eight in the morning at Senso-ji, before the lantern gets its audience

The great red lantern at the Kaminarimon gate weighs about 700 kilos and by eleven in the morning there will be two hundred people photographing it. At eight there are five, and a woman sweeping, and the smell of incense drifting down the approach from the temple.

Walk up Nakamise, the stall street leading to the main hall, while the shutters are still going up — rice crackers grilling, bean-paste cakes stamped in moulds, folding fans, wooden combs. At the top, do the things everyone does, because they are good: wave the smoke from the big bronze censer over whatever part of you needs help, and shake the numbered stick out of the metal tin to draw a fortune. If you get the bad one — and Senso-ji is famous for handing out a lot of them — tie it to the rack provided and leave it behind. That is the system.

Senso-ji dates from 645, which makes it the oldest temple in Tokyo, though almost nothing you are standing in is original: this city has burned down, shaken down and been bombed flat within living memory, and rebuilt every time. Which is why Yanaka is worth an afternoon. It is one of the few neighbourhoods that largely survived both the 1923 earthquake and the war, and walking its low wooden shopfronts and temple lanes — with the famous population of unbothered cats — is the closest you can get to the city that stood here before the towers.

Breakfast at a fish market, and the auction at half past five

The wholesalers moved to Toyosu in 2018, but the outer market at Tsukiji stayed exactly where it was, and it is the best breakfast in Tokyo. Narrow lanes, stalls a metre wide, everything cooked in front of you: tamagoyaki, hot and sweet, on a stick. Scallops the size of a fist grilling in their shells. Sea urchin. Tuna cheek skewers. Strawberries in winter that taste like someone concentrated them.

It is a morning place. By early afternoon the shutters come down. Go hungry, eat across a dozen stalls, and spend some time in the knife shops even if you have no intention of buying — the craftsmanship is extraordinary, and someone will happily explain the difference between the steels to you for twenty minutes.

If you want the real theatre, though, it is across the water. At Toyosu, the tuna auction starts around 5:30 in the morning and you watch it from an observation deck above the floor: rows of frozen bluefin laid out like ordnance, buyers crouching with torches to inspect the tail cuts, and then a bell and a burst of hand signals and shouting that is over almost before you have understood it. Fish the size of a person changing hands for the price of a car, at an hour when the rest of the city is still asleep.

The loudest crossing on earth, and a forest fifteen minutes away

The Shibuya scramble is the single best piece of choreography in any city. The lights change, traffic stops in every direction at once, and up to three thousand people step off the kerbs and cross diagonally, straight through each other, and nobody collides. Nobody even breaks stride. Watch it from above — the station walkway or a window seat in one of the cafés overlooking it — and then go down and do it yourself several times, which is not embarrassing and which everyone does.

Then walk fifteen minutes north-west and the volume simply stops. You pass under a cypress torii twelve metres high and you are in a forest: a hundred thousand trees, donated from every province of Japan and planted by volunteers a century ago, designed to mature into exactly the woodland you are now standing in. The gravel crunches. The traffic disappears within about thirty metres. At the shrine at the centre you may well walk into a wedding procession — a bride under a white silk hood, a priest in front, everyone moving very slowly across the courtyard.

That these two places sit a mile apart is the entire argument for Tokyo. And if you want the volume back, Akihabara after dark is six-storey buildings of games, electronics, models and arcades, all lit like a landing strip, with the trains going past overhead.

Wading through light, and a garden the size of a neighbourhood

At teamLab Planets you take your shoes off at the door, roll your trousers to the knee, and then spend an hour walking barefoot through water in the dark while koi made of light swim around your legs and burst into flowers when you touch them. There is a room of hanging orchids that lifts as you approach and closes behind you. There is a mirrored hall where you genuinely cannot tell where the floor ends. Book a slot well ahead and wear something that rolls up.

The Skytree is 634 metres of tower and the view is the entire Kanto plain, which from that height reads less like a city than like a geological feature. On a cold, clear winter morning Fuji appears on the western horizon, floating above the haze. That is worth planning around rather than hoping for.

And then, when the noise has accumulated — and it does accumulate — there is Shinjuku Gyoen. Fifty-eight hectares of former imperial garden with English lawn, French parterre and Japanese landscape gardens inside one wall, five minutes from the busiest railway station on the planet. In early April it is a cherry-blossom event of national significance; the rest of the year it is simply the best place in central Tokyo to sit down. Ueno Park does something similar with museums attached — the national collection of Japanese art, a pond covered in lotus, temples, and a thousand cherry trees.

Missing the last train is not a problem here. It is a plan.

The trains stop around midnight, and the entire nightlife of this city is arranged around that fact. You either leave in time, or you commit — and committing, in Shinjuku, means Thermae-Yu.

It is a genuine hot-spring bathhouse in the middle of the densest entertainment district in Tokyo, with real onsen water trucked in, indoor and outdoor baths, saunas, and rows of reclining loungers. It opens at eleven in the morning and stays open until nine the following one. There is a late-night premium after midnight, roughly what a cheap capsule hotel would cost, and for that you can sit outside in hot water at two in the morning with the neon of Kabukicho glowing over the wall, then sleep in a chair and walk out at eight into a completely ordinary Tokyo morning.

Two practical things, said plainly rather than glossed. Bathing is unclothed and separated by gender, and you wash thoroughly at the seated showers before you get in — this is not optional and everyone will notice. And tattoos are still restricted at many traditional baths in Japan, so if you have visible ink, check the current policy before you build an evening around it. That is not squeamishness; it is just how it works, and being told in advance is better than being turned around at the door.

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Written by hand and fact-checked on 2026-08-19. Opening hours, ticketing and prices change — check them before you rely on them.