Everything About Tokyo Is True
Everything you’ve heard is accurate. Not approximately accurate or true in the way travel writing means true, but factually, literally, completely true. The scale is real. The density is real. The food at eleven in the morning that makes you want to tear up your return ticket—that’s real. I went expecting to be impressed and came back changed in some low-frequency way I’m still working out.
The city is enormous past the point of legibility, but the subway is one of those rare systems that rewards the effort of understanding it. Once the map is in your head—or on your phone, more realistically—the whole thing unlocks. Every station is its own neighborhood with its own logic. You could spend two weeks moving between them and never feel like you were covering ground twice.
Food is the obvious starting point, and in Tokyo the obvious starting point is almost always correct. The places that matter are the izakayas—unpretentious, brightly lit, running the menu from sashimi to tempura to dressed potato salad—and the best ones feel like they exist primarily for the people who live within walking distance. Touhachi in Nakameguro was my anchor: one stop from Shibuya on the express, consistently full, not a tourist in sight. Fish, if you’re serious about it, is better approached through the late-afternoon market near Okachimachi Station—where locals negotiate over the day’s remaining catch around five in the evening—than through the famous tuna auction at Tsukiji, which involves waking before dawn and elbowing through tour groups for a view. The small restaurants surrounding Okachimachi serve things that span a wide ethical and gustatory range: fugu, whale, creatures from depths you might prefer not to think about.
Gonpachi in Nishi Azabu handles atmosphere at the high end—this is the restaurant where they shot the fight sequences in Kill Bill, the long wooden hall with the lanterns and the balconies. Touristy in the sense that everyone who knows about it goes, but it earned the attention. Neats in Yutenji does the opposite: organic, quiet, the kind of place that makes you briefly feel like a person who has their life in order.
Golden Gai in Shinjuku is the fastest way to understand Tokyo drinking: roughly 150 bars packed into six narrow alleys, some of them fitting barely ten people, each one with its own character—jazz records, film ephemera, someone’s handwritten manifesto taped to the wall. You walk in without a plan and come out at two in the morning having talked to strangers in a way that doesn’t happen in larger, louder venues. Kinfolk in Nakameguro runs at a different register—a bar operated by a Japanese fixed-gear bicycle company, the crowd a mix of locals and transplants, the cocktails genuinely lethal. Karaoke, after enough of those cocktails, stops being optional. The all-you-can-drink deals that kick in after midnight in half the bars in the city are engineered to ensure your voice is ready before your judgment checks out.
For late-night music, Dommune is something specific: fifty people inside, thousands more watching the webcast. Acts like DJ Four Tet and Jamie xx have played there. The size is the point—there’s nowhere to be passive about the sound.
Shopping in Tokyo operates on the assumption that you have either unlimited funds or unlimited willpower, and probably neither. Ginza is where the money goes seriously. Aoyama and Daikanyama are where the Japanese fashion houses cluster, the ones where the architecture is as considered as the clothes. Harajuku on a Sunday afternoon is its own category: thousands of teenagers in Lolita dresses and elaborate fantasy costumes, wearing their aesthetics with complete conviction. It doesn’t feel like performance. It feels like the most serious thing they do all week. La Foret is the department store for this world. Big Love handles records. Kiddy Land handles Hello Kitty and everything adjacent, which covers more territory than you’d imagine. Pass the Baton, in the basement of Omotesando Hills, is a consignment shop for personal objects that come with notes about their history—sounds like a concept, doesn’t feel like one.
Akihabara is what the maps call Electric Town, though that barely covers it. The Mandarake Complex runs eight floors of manga, collectibles, and vintage games. There’s a Maid Café, which you should visit once if only to understand what it is. For the same energy without the tourist density, Nakano Broadway a few stations further out is where the actual obsessives go—figure collectors, vintage-game completionists, people who’ve been doing this for twenty years and have strong opinions.
For sleeping: the Claska Hotel in Meguro has a gallery in the lobby and a design sensibility that doesn’t strain for effect. Capsule hotels are worth doing at least once—some now offer mixed-gender sleeping areas. More likely, though, you’ll end up in a manga café after missing the last train. The trains stop around midnight, the first one runs at five, and the cafes have individual booths, drinks ordered by the hour, and more reading material than you’d get through in a lifetime. I’ve spent worse nights in worse places. The love hotels—which exist not for prostitution but because Japanese apartments are small and walls carry sound—occupy a separate category entirely. Some are priced accordingly; all are decorated with a conviction that suggests the designer refused every note of restraint. You’d book one of those rooms exactly once, and remember it.
Temples: after the third one, the distinctions blur without specialist knowledge. The exception is early morning at Meiji Jingu in Harajuku—the long gravel path through the trees, the silence, the way the whole place runs on a different time zone from the surrounding city. Worth setting an alarm for, if you can manage it.
For views: the observation deck of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku is free and the sight lines are excellent. The premium version is the night view from the Sky Deck at Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills—around twenty euros, includes entry to the Mori Art Museum on the 53rd floor, which programs serious contemporary shows. For the genuinely strange: the Meguro Parasitology Museum is the only institution of its kind in the world, and I mean that literally. The earthquake museum in Ikebukuro will put you through a simulated magnitude-7 event, which you do not need to experience twice. Cat cafes exist, and yes, you should go, and yes, it is exactly what you expect, and that somehow doesn’t diminish it at all.
Tokyo doesn’t disappoint. I knew this before I went. It still caught me off guard.