Tokyo in 7 days

Tsurugaoka Hachimangū is the heart of the Kamakura that was Japan's military capital for a century and a half: the shrine sits at the top of the steps, reached along a dead-straight avenue that starts at the sea, with three red gates in a row — a ceremonial axis you still walk today, step by step. Entry is free, and the journey is simpler than it looks too: the train from Tokyo costs about ¥950 each way (€5.10) on a Suica alone, nothing to book — the easiest day trip in the world. One gentle warning: if you hear drums, a Shinto wedding is under way; you watch from a distance and don't photograph faces. Then on to the bamboo temple: a short half hour on foot along the Kanazawa-kaidō, or ten minutes on the local bus.

Suggested time here: 47 min

Hōkoku-ji is the bamboo temple: two thousand stems along a path of barely eighty metres, so dense the light arrives green, and at the end a teahouse on a tatami platform looking straight into the grove. Entry costs ¥400 (€2.15), and the ¥600 for matcha with a seasonal sweet (€3.20) is the best money of the day: you sit down, the sound of the canes knocking together covers everything else, and nobody is in a hurry — not even you, and that's a feeling the city had made you forget. It's a small stop and should be taken as one: a true half hour, no rushing and no stretching. The walk back to the station is the long one of the morning, a good half hour — and lunch on the pedestrian street repays all of it.

Shimokitazawa is the quarter of small theatres, used records and a hundred or so second-hand clothes shops packed into five blocks — and its planning secret is almost an accident: the streets are too narrow for cars, and that, more than any zoning plan, is what made it the liveable place it is. The hour calls for honesty: the shops open around 11 am, and right now almost everything is shut and silent. But the walk is worth it anyway, and it's actually the rarer version: the shutters, the theatre posters, the quarter waking up at its own pace. You wander at random and go in wherever you like the sign — a correct route doesn't exist here, and that's the point. Just beyond is Bonus Track, the quarter built over the buried tracks: twelve minutes.

Suggested time here: 1h 18m

Bonus Track is the quarter born above a buried railway: when the tracks went underground, a strip of land was left on the surface — and instead of selling it they built a row of low houses, shop below and home above, rented to whoever wanted to have a go. The result is a sample book of stubborn trades: a bookshop, a miso fermenter, a coffee roaster. It isn't a shopping centre dressed up as a neighbourhood, and you feel the difference as you walk: it's the most successful attempt yet at bringing a new piece of city to life without designing its soul at a desk. Look, buy something small, move on: the Keiō Inokashira train leaves from Shimo-Kitazawa and reaches Kichijōji in twenty minutes, where the line ends.

Toyosu Market is where Tsukiji's inner market moved in 2018, and clarity here saves disappointment: the old one no longer exists — what's left at Tsukiji is the outer market, a different thing altogether, six kilometres from here. The glassed-in walkways above the tuna floor are free and open from 5 am; the real auction, though, runs between 5:30 and 6:30 am, so at 9 you see the carcasses laid out in rows and the wholesalers at work, not the bidding — better to know it going in, so you look at what's there instead of hunting for what isn't. Last warning, a calendar one: closed on Sundays, public holidays and many Wednesdays. Then two stops on the Yurikamome and you're in knee-deep water, literally.

Suggested time here: 1h 52m

teamLab Planets is not a museum, and better to say it straight away: you leave your shoes at the entrance and cross rooms of knee-deep water, soft floors and gardens of suspended orchids, on a fixed route of an hour and a half — art you cross with your body, not look at from a distance. The logistics are half the undertaking: tickets from ¥3,600 (about €19.40), varying by date, ONLINE only and to be booked weeks ahead — weekends sell out a month in advance. Dress right: trousers roll up above the knee, long skirts are a problem. And don't confuse it with teamLab Borderless, which is at Azabudai Hills and a completely different experience. One last thing: Planets has an announced closure at the end of 2027 — if it tempts you, this is the right trip.

Kanda Myōjin has thirteen hundred years of history and the most modern neighbours possible: just below the hill the electronics quarter begins, and the shrine has adapted in its own way — amulets for IT security are sold here, and technicians bring new servers along to be blessed. It isn't folklore laid on for tourists: it's how the Japanese relationship with the sacred actually works, never having seen a conflict between the rite and the microchip. Entry is free and the visit is short but dense: watch who is there and what they come to ask for, more than the architecture — that's where the story is. Then down into the electric town: Akihabara begins at the bottom of the slope, ten minutes on foot.

Suggested time here: 1h 5m

Akihabara was born as a market for radio parts after the war and has never stopped selling whatever the future of the moment is: today it's eight floors of manga and vintage video games, but under the tracks the component shops the size of a broom cupboard hold out, where you can still buy resistors by weight — the two souls of the same quarter, ten metres apart. Looking costs nothing, and that's the right way to take it: go in, go up, browse, come out. One stop deserves a mention: the arcades, their first floors always full of people playing alone and playing brilliantly — a show in its own right, deadly serious and hypnotic. Then a complete change of register: west along Yasukuni-dōri, in a short twenty minutes, are the curry capital and the second-hand books.