Author: Carlos Costa
Written May 2023
For me, Tokyo is the perfect blend of futuristic vs vintage, analog vs digital. Not many people speak English and Japanese culture is weird (in a good way).
Below are a few places I visited in Jan 2024. My favorite things are marked with a 💙. I’ve also pined a few of the locations on a Google Maps:
Tokyo is organized in different “cities” and each city in districts. It's huge (I only saw 4 cities out of a total of 23), so I would recommend focusing on one district at a time. You will probably want to spend most of your time in Omotesando/Shijuku (shopping of all kinds/ art galleries/ cafes), Roppongi (nightlife/ bars), Harajuku (nightlife/ clubs/ shopping) and Ginza (cool business area). Choose 1 or 2 neighbourhoods per day and walk around. Tokyo is huge, it takes time to get from one place to the other. Kind of like London. The Metro is good and cheap.
Things to do:
- Akihabara: Manga/ Anime/ Tech / Nerds / Weird stuff
- Shibuya / Harajuku đź’™: Busy shopping district, Shibuya has the famous shibuya crossing. Harajuku small streets with second hand shops.
- Ginza đź’™: High class neighbourhood. Where well off people from Tokyo go shgopping, dinning or going out for bars, there are nice izakaya (typical Japanese Tabern) under the train tracks for dinner or drinks near Ginza station.
- Shinjuku: Kind of like the red light district of Tokyo - did not enjoy it as much. It has the Golden Gai (Little bar street) but it’s very touristy.
- Tsukiji Fish Market - Best in the mornings, it has good sushi.
- TeamLabs - Cool museum
- Daikoku - The real Tokyo Drift, go at night, but you might need a local to take you there. It’s quite far to get to.
- Roppongi - Cool area with bars to go out.
- Analog Camera Shoppingđź’™: I love analog cameras and Tokyo is the place to get them, there are quite a lot of shops in my google maps list above. My favourite shop was film camera tokyo in Harakuju, but it was expensive
- Sumo Wrestiling: I didn’t do it because I didn’t have time but I got recommended to do it by a few friends. Do it early morning.
- Tokyo Tower: didn’t do it because I didn’t have time but I got recommended to do it by a few friends. Apparently it has nice views of Mt Fuji.
Others
- Haneda airport is much closer to the city : Fly in and out of it if you have a choice.
- Narita is quite far from the city and could be a super long drive, Narita express could be a better option. (Also taxi is like 200USD :)
- If you are taking trains around Japan you might want to buy the Japan Rail Pass before you leave.
As always take this with a pinch of salt and go get lost.