Tokyo

The eastern wards sit on low, flat alluvial land laid out on canals, and they are still built at street level: temple approaches, market lanes, small workshops, shops with their fronts open. The western wards sit on a higher, drier terrace and were rebuilt in the twentieth century around railway terminals, which is why the big stations there work vertically, in layers of concourse and basement, and are so hard to read on a first visit.

Knowing which half you are in makes the city far less exhausting. Spend a day on the low ground on foot, where walking between things is the pleasure, and treat the terminal districts as places you go to for a specific reason rather than wander. It also explains why the two feel like different cities: they were built in different centuries for different purposes, and the rivers between them are the seam.

Four days for the city, and then a decision about whether Tokyo means the city at all. The prefecture also contains a mountain district in the west and a chain of subtropical islands several hundred kilometres out to sea, and both are administratively Tokyo in a way that surprises people looking at a metro map.

For the city, the useful unit is the district rather than the day: two or three neighbourhoods per day, chosen to be adjacent, is the rate at which this works. Trying to cross the city three times in a day is how visitors end up remembering trains.

Beyond the centre, the Okutama valley and Mount Takao are ninety minutes and fifty minutes west respectively — Takao in particular is a genuinely good half-day mountain from a metro station. The islands are a different trip altogether: Oshima is a night ferry or a short flight, and the further ones are a serious commitment measured in days rather than hours.

Haneda is 15 minutes from Shinagawa by monorail and train; Narita is an hour or more, so the fare and time difference is worth checking when booking. Inside the city, an IC card on the JR Yamanote line and the two subway networks covers almost everything, and taxis are rarely faster. Note that the subways are run by two separate operators and transferring between them costs extra. Mt. Takao is 50 minutes from Shinjuku on the Keio line; Okutama is about two hours on the Chuo and Ome lines. The islands are the exception — Oshima and Hachijojima have flights, but the Ogasawara group is reachable only by a 24-hour ferry.

The administrative boundaries here extend far out to sea. There is a chain of volcanic islands south of the bay that belongs to the capital, and beyond them another group several hundred kilometres further out — subtropical, reached by a ferry that takes the better part of a day, with whales offshore and no airport at all.

For most visitors this is a curiosity rather than a plan, and that is the right reading on a first trip. But it is worth knowing that the nearer islands are a short flight or an overnight sailing, have volcanic hot springs and camellia forest, and make a genuinely different second week for someone who has already done the city. The far group is a serious commitment measured in days, because the crossing is long and the sailing schedule, not your own dates, decides how long you stay.

Cherry blossom weekends in the famous parks, and the two weeks around New Year, when a surprising amount of the city closes — small restaurants especially — and the shrines are at their most crowded. Golden Week empties the city of residents and fills it with domestic visitors, which is a net wash for queues but bad for accommodation prices.

August is the harder call. The heat and humidity in central Tokyo are genuinely punishing and the city offers little shade, but it is also festival and fireworks season and the evenings are the best of the year. If you come then, invert the day: indoors and underground in the afternoon, outside after five. Avoid the rainy season in June only if your plans are outdoors; the museums are excellent and empty in it.

Edomae sushi was fast food built on fish from the bay, and the style — vinegared rice, a brush of soy, cured or simmered toppings — is a preservation technique that outlived its reason. Monjayaki is Tsukishima's own dish, a looser cousin of okonomiyaki scraped off the griddle with small spatulas. The soba tradition runs deep in the eastern wards, where the mills stood. Tsukiji's outer market still trades even though the auctions moved to Toyosu in 2018, and the Ogasawara islands send up passion fruit and rum.

Cherry blossoms usually open in the last week of March and last about ten days. Summers are the hard part: July and August run above 33°C with high humidity and the heat holds overnight, which makes long walking days unpleasant. September still carries typhoon risk. Late October to early December is the best stretch of the year — dry, clear, with the ginkgo avenues turning yellow in the third week of November and Fuji visible from the towers on cold mornings. Winter is mild, sunny and almost snow-free, with January highs near 10°C. The Ogasawara ferry runs roughly weekly and each trip is a 24-hour crossing.

Never hire a car. This is the one prefecture in Japan where that advice is unqualified: the rail network is the densest in the world, parking is expensive and scarce, and the roads are slower than the trains at almost every hour.

The thing worth knowing instead is that Tokyo's rail is run by several operators and the transfers between them are where time actually goes. A prepaid card handles the fares; what it does not handle is that changing from a subway to a private line at a large interchange can be a ten-minute walk. Build itineraries around adjacency rather than around the map's apparent distances, and treat Shinjuku and Tokyo stations as places to avoid changing at during the rush if there is any alternative.

A first visit should be neighbourhoods, not sights. The list of famous things in Tokyo is long and mostly beside the point; what the city actually offers is that each district is a different city, and walking one properly — a market, a shrine, a shopping street, a bar under the railway arches — tells you more than four landmark visits across four wards.

A second visit should leave the twenty-three wards. Take the train west to Okutama for the river gorge and the cedar forest, or climb Takao on a weekday, or get on the boat to Oshima and stand on a volcano that is legally part of the same prefecture as the Ginza. Almost no visitor does any of this, and it reframes what Tokyo is — not a city with a hinterland, but a prefecture that happens to have the largest city on earth at one end of it.