TOKYO

There is a very high chance that you will swing by these two neighborhoods many times during your visit of Tokyo, as they have two of the biggest metro stations, with connections for over a dozen train and subway lines (the most popular one is the JR Yamanote line) and the thousands of people that pass through them every day. For this reason walking outside Shibuya station, on the famous Shibuya crossing (that you can see for free from the windows of the Starbucks in the Tsutaya building or paying $20 from the top of the new Shibuya Sky), is an experience you cannot miss --together with a photo by the famous Hachikō statue. The area around it is very touristy (many department stores are here. We liked LOFT a lot, which has seven floors of truly Japanese household & stationary items!) and not particularly attractive, but it gives you a good sense of the rushing life of Tokyo with also a good variety of chain stores and quick food restaurants that can be reassuring if you feel a little bit lost. We ate at this gyoza place that was quite good on the second floor of a building facing the crowded Shibuya-Center-Gai street and we also had some good ramen here. From the Shibuya Crossing you can walk East to the much more interesting Aoyama and Omotesando districts, or head west to the more residential and quaint part of the area.

As for Shinjuku, there are people who love this area, but I have to say I found the flashing lights and homogeneity of the buildings quite boring, especially on the largest street named Yasukumi-dori, where most of the skyscrapers are, and the probability of bumping into a tourist trap here is really high. But there are a few interesting things to do in Shinjuku, one being to stroll around the smaller streets around Omoide Yokocho and the Golden Gai (the famous food alleys featuring a selection of counter-serve stalls for simple fare and alcoholic drinks), and also to visit the pretty Hanazono-jinja shrine nearby. We went to a cat cafè which was fun but a little stinky and had a nice afternoon snack at the pretty Muji Café. Shinjuku also hosts the very beautiful Gyoen National Garden, that we didn't get to see because it was always closed when we were around it. 

Shinjuku also hosts the most famous gay district of the city, Ni-chōme, in a country that only recently has started to accept openly LGBTQ communities.

You should start your tour of these three beautiful areas (probably our favorite ones in Tokyo) from the very famous and beautiful Meji-Jingu Park (one of the few attractions you really cannot miss in the city), which you can easily enter from the exit of Harajuku station on the Yamanote line. We walked to see the giant shrine, the temple, and its amazing gardens (it's big, so it takes at least one hour to see everything). After leaving the park, we walked down to Takeshita street, a popular pedestrian street featuring mostly touristy and chain shops (most of them very tacky) while heading to the much prettier side of Harajuku, which is one of the trendiest consignment/thrift shop areas of Tokyo, with lots of art galleries (go see Design Festa Gallery, where there are always small artists exihbiting their art work) and pretty cafes. If you cross Omotesando-dori towards Shibuya, you should find Cat Street, a quiet backstreet with limited car traffic, lined with funky & upmarket fashion boutiques & cafes in small and cute buildings. 

This area becomes fancier and fancier the closer you get to the corner with Aoyama-dori, which is considered the center of the very posh and beautiful Omotesando (and also the location of the metro station). There are many boutiques here and they're all super expensive, making look this area more like Paris than an Asian capital! If you keep walking down on the Omotesando-dori, you will enter Aoyama, an even more sophisticated part of the city, that is also famous for art galleries and designer stores. There we visited the famous Nezu Museum, a very cool building designed by Kengo Kuma, which hosts a small but interesting collection of Japanese and Asian art, a pretty cafè and a beautiful garden (we ended up there on a rainy day but it was perfect).

The popular neighborhood of Roppongi is few steps away: you have to walk up the hill towards the modern Roppongi Hills center. It is famous for the Mori Art Museum (from the top of which is said to have the best view of Tokyo). Nearby you can have dinner in the restaurant where they filmed Kill Bill (reservations highly recommended) or take the metro in the deepest subway station of Tokyo. Another very fancy mall that was recently opened in this area is Tokyo Midtown.

We did all of these areas in two days, but they are part of the same side of the city so they can be considered similar. If you start from Otemachi metro station (which is a big one, being very close to all the government buildings) you can visit the Higashi Gyoen Garden before having a glimpse of the Imperial Palace. If you don't have a lot of time in Tokyo, I would skip this, because there's no much that you can visit of the palace, besides the gardens and the huge moats.

From there you can walk through the working districts of Otemachi and Kanda (you basically follow the train tracks where the Yamanote Line also passes) and you will reach Akihabara pretty quickly. This neighborhood is a buzzing shopping hub famed for its electronics retailers, ranging from tiny stalls to vast department stores like Yodobashi Multimedia Akiba. Venues are specialized in manga, anime, and video games so enter in one of them to experience the crazy world of Japanese pop-culture and video games! What we were happy to discover nearby, was the peaceful Kanda Shrine, which has also a cute little museum attached.

Walking to Asakusa could be a bit of a  stretch, but by metro it is only a couple of stops away. This is where the number one attraction in Tokyo is, the famous Sensoji Temple, so you shouldn't be surprised by the floods of tourists that pass through this area, especially on the souvenirs-stalled street that connect the temple to the Kaminarimon Gate. But around the area there are many old traditional shops and also a number of good restaurants, including the one where our friend Tamako and her brother took us to taste the delicious Sukyaki (or Japanese Hotpot), on the covered Asakusa Shin-Nakamise street.

One thing that I did with Luigi in 1999 and wanted to do again with the girls in 2019, was to take the ferry boat from Asakusa along the Sumida River, which I would also highly recommend! You start from the Tokyo Cruise Station, overlooking the famous Asahi Flame building and you enjoy a lovely boat ride (we took the old boat) down to the wonderful Hamarikyu Gardens, right after passing the old Fish Market of Tsukuji (now only partially open to the public). We loved this beautiful paradise in the middle of Tokyo, where you can also taste a delicious tea with treats in the famous Tea House. The gardens are near two other very elegant parts of the city, Shimbashi (where many luxurious hotels are) and right next to it, Ginza. This is a popular upscale shopping area of Tokyo, with numerous internationally renowned department stores and boutiques (like the beautiful Hermès building overlooking the Sony Park square, or the eleven-floor flagship store of Uniqlo) and restaurants. It is considered to be one of the most expensive, elegant, and luxurious streets in the world. If you keep walking up North you will end up in another very busy area around Tokyo Station, where also one of the biggest underground malls, Yaesu, is. The northern façade (from the Marunouchi side) of the train station, as big as it can be in a city like Tokyo, has been recently renovated, exposing the original old red brick colonial building - and the whole square in front of it is pretty neat. From here you are exactly back at the Imperial Palace where we started!

This is definitely the area of Tokyo that I liked the most both times I was there, although very different from what you expect from Japan's bursting capital -but charming nonetheless. We were there three times last summer, but the best tour was given to us by our Ueno-raised friend Tamako. What a privilege!

Ueno station is another big, important train connection hub and is considered the "other center of Tokyo", since its homonymous park is there, with some of the city's most important museums. Ueno also marks the border with one of Tokyo's oldest areas, Nippori and Yanaka. Before walking heading there, you can stop at the famous Ameyokochō, a bustling market just south of the station that became a popular illegal trade spot after WWII during rationing and it's now a very touristy neighborhood where you can buy cheap souvenirs or food. But the biggest attraction in the area is definitely the wonderful Ueno Kōen, Tokyo's biggest and most famous park, and I really recommend a walk through it, as there are always festivals or opportunities for people watching (this is where most locals tend to go, especially during the weekends). Walk around the Shinobazu Pond, in the south corner, to see the beautiful lotus beds and the little temple of Benten-dō. Next to it there is also the Shitamachi Museum which reconstructs the old proletarian houses that used to be in this area and describes their daily life. Unfortunately only Luigi visited (and loved) the impressive Tokyo National Museum, on the north side of the park, which hosts the world's largest collection of Japanese Art, but also Asian art and many other exhibits. In the park there are other museums as well, like the National Museum of Science and Nature, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the National Museum of Western Art, and also the Ueno Zoo. 

If you keep walking north, you will pass by Tokyo's University of the Arts, the city's most famous art institution, and enter the area of Yanaka (bigger Nippori), which has so many things to see! Start from the temples of Kanei-ji and walk west through the little streets, which have some of the city's oldest shops (for example we went with Tamako to an old Amezaiku "the art of crafting candy" store and it was amazing) and many small, pretty temples like Jomyoin and Chounji. But the main interest of this area is the beautiful and famous Nezu Shrine, which is probably my favorite shrine in Tokyo. Because it's the oldest, it's surrounded by a beautiful park with many red toriis like Kyoto's Fushimi Inari (without the crowds) and it's a very tranquil spot in the middle of the city. Being also next to the city's art institutions and the prestigious Tokyo University, the whole area is also home to many art galleries and artists' studios. We couldn't visit the famous SCAI Bath House reconverted into a Contemporary Art museum, but I heard it's amazing. In 1999 we visited the beautiful Asakura Museum of Sculpture which is hosted inside the artist's house. Yanaka Old Cemetery is also another must-see in this neighborhood, together with many other small shrines, and I loved strolling there one Sunday afternoon and bumping into the beautiful Tennō-ji Temple. From the cemetery you can take some steps down and get to Yanaka Ginza, the commercial part of the neighborhood, which is very pleasant and has many traditional shops and food stalls. From there you can take the Yamanote line at the convenient Nippori station nearby. 

In this section I describe all the very pretty neighborhoods that we visited in the Western part of Tokyo, basically to the left of the Meguro river and the Yamanote line circle.

Starting from just south of Shibuya, you have two pretty and popular areas that are Daikan-yama and Naka-Meguro. Daikan-yama (just one stop down on the Tokyu-Toyoko line) is one of Tokyo's classiest districts, and we really liked the European-style shops and cafes there. Right next to it, on the other side of the Meguro river, is Naka-Meguro, a very trendy and lively area, filled with little restaurants and famous for the lovely strolls you can take along the river (Meguro-kawa), especially during cherry blossom. If you keep walking south you will meet Meguro and the larger Ebisu areas, which are less charming than the other two districts but host some interesting museums, like Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, that we visited, and Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, in the beautiful Art deco former residence of Prince Asaka. 

The whole time we were in Tokyo last summer we rented a beautiful house in the Komazawa-Daigaku area, which we ended up knowing quite well. It's very convenient to all major attractions, as it lays on the Daen-toshi line, 6 minutes away from Shibuya. It's a very residential area, with mostly two-story houses (except near the metro line and the main Tamagawa-Dory avenue) and it's famous in Tokyo for the nice Komazawa Olympic Park. Next to this area is also Sakura-Shimmachi, which is a lovely and almost village-like neighborhood that we visited the first time we were in Tokyo. North of Komazawa instead, is the very bohemian and young Shimo-Kitazawa, also known as "Shimokita", that is well known, besides for being the place where the famous author Banana Yoshimoto lives, but for the density of consignment stores, cafes, theaters, bars and live music venues and that we visited with our friend Dominic who used to teach English there. Check out this guide before heading there! Not far from this area is the amazing Ghibli Museum, that you can visit only if you have booked your tickets well in advance! We missed that piece of information and we sadly couldn't go this time.

We went less to the Eastern part of Tokyo, but we visited a few interesting places, like the popular and crowded Ikebukuro, one of Tokyo's main commercial/corporate hubs (where we visited Juyū gakuen Myōnichikan, a school designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and the less-known Shin-Ōkubo, the K-Pop and J-Pop mecca, full of merchandise stores and especially Korean beauty shops. It's a fun street and from there you can easily walk to Shinjuku.

Another interesting neighborhood I wanted to see was Kagurazaka, an area east of Shinjuku and north of the Imperial Palace, that being near many international schools and especially the Institute français du Japon (upper-class Japanese are obsessed with France) is very elegant. The uphill street of Kagurazaka-dori has some interesting stores and not surprisingly a very good French bakery. There we also visited the pretty Akagi shrine, that is surrounded by some cute streets. From there, we walked to the Tokyo Dome where we wanted to visit the famous Koshikhawa Koakuen Gardens (that were closed) but we ended up enjoying the atmosphere around the famous Tokyo Dome City amusement park.

Luigi and the girls went to Tokyo's SkyTree while I was in Yanaka one day and they loved looking at Tokyo from the 634 meter tower (the tallest tower in the world, and second tallest structure after the Burj Khalifa!). I would have been terrified! They say it's usually packed with people waiting in line, but they didn't have to wait much.

One Sunday we agreed, after some convincing, to take the girls to Tokyo DisneySea, one of the two Disney parks in Japan, which is apparently very unique because it's the only one in the world and has all coastal/water themed attractions. The attention to detail and theming unlike any other Disney park and is very impressive, it could only be a product of Japanese dedication and work ethic. I am not a fan of amusement parks but I enjoyed the experience of going on the rides with tons of Japanese teenagers/students and families. To get there you need to take three different trains -- it's in the direction of Narita airport, by the harbor.

We didn't have time to visit the island of Odaiba this time, which is also famous for the big hot spring resosrts of Ōedo Onsen Monogatari and despite being an old settlement, it has become pretty popular in the last few years because of the modern development that includes the giant statue of Gundam and the TeamLab Borderless exhibition.