Japan
2024

The trip opened on the quieter, leafier western edge of Tokyo. Kichijōji is the kind of neighborhood Tokyoites themselves keep voting the most livable in the city — a tangle of covered shopping arcades, tiny standing bars, and bakeries wrapped around the green sprawl of Inokashira Park. The first days were about settling in: a chestnut Mont Blanc, a board of sushi cut that morning, a slow loop of the park's pond where a vermilion Benzaiten shrine sits out over the water.

Inokashira also hides the trip's first pilgrimage. Tucked into its southwestern corner is the Ghibli Museum, the storybook-built home of Studio Ghibli that Hayao Miyazaki designed to be wandered rather than toured — "let's get lost, together." Photography is forbidden inside, which is its own kind of spell; you keep only what you remember. So the only frames are of the rounded, almost edible entrance and the hand-cast sign at the park gate.

Ginza takes its name from the silver mint the Tokugawa shogunate moved here in 1612 — gin-za, the silver place. Four centuries on, it is still where Tokyo goes to glitter: flagship boutiques, the Wakō building with its 1932 Hattori clock tower presiding over the Ginza 4-chōme crossing, and avenues that turn into rivers of light after dark.

There was a surprise tucked among the boutiques, too — a Wizard of Oz memorabilia exhibit, ruby slippers glittering on their stands and the Wicked Witch of the West staring out from a glass case. A very Hollywood ghost to meet in the heart of Tokyo. The long exposure down the avenue, taillights smeared into ribbons, is Ginza doing what it does best.

Step through the great wooden torii off Harajuku's busiest corner and the city simply… stops. Meiji Jingū, completed in 1920 and dedicated to Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken, sits inside a man-made forest of some 100,000 trees donated from across Japan — a woodland engineered to look eternal. The gravel approach muffles everything; within a few hundred meters Tokyo's roar is gone.

Along the path stand two famous walls of barrels. One is sake, straw-wrapped and offered each year by brewers nationwide; the other, facing it, is Burgundy wine — a nod to Emperor Meiji's role in opening Japan to the West. We caught the shrine in early-November quiet: the cypress otorii, an autumn chrysanthemum display, and the great Rōmon gate with its paper lanterns.

A few steps from the shrine's hush, Takeshita Street is the opposite of everything Meiji Jingū stands for — a narrow, neon-lit gauntlet of crêpe stands, sticker shops, and teenage fashion that has been Tokyo's youth-culture engine since the 1980s. The reward for wading in: a perfectly absurd KISS T-shirt, the band's name rendered phonetically in katakana — きっす — for a guitarist who appreciated the cross-cultural translation.

Outside Shibuya Station sits Hachikō, the bronze Akita who waited at this spot every evening for an owner who had died — and kept waiting, for nearly ten years, until his own death in 1935. He is now Tokyo's most beloved meeting point. A block away is the Shibuya Scramble, the choreographed chaos where every light turns red at once and a thousand people cross from all directions without touching — best seen at dusk, as Center-Gai's neon flickers on.

Shinjuku is Tokyo at full volume — the world's busiest railway station fanning out into skyscrapers, lantern-lit alleys, and department-store food halls. Overhead twists the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, a 204-meter fashion school from 2008 whose white lattice really is meant to read as a cocoon nurturing the students inside.

The day wandered between scales: a Hokkaido-milk soft serve guarded by toy cows, a tiny shrine glowing between office towers after dark, a skyline view with Skytree pinned to the horizon, and a string-lit dinner that ended the evening just the two of us.

The Imperial Palace stands on the bones of Edo Castle, the Tokugawa shogunate's seat and once the largest fortress on earth. The shōguns are gone and the main keep was never rebuilt, but the moats, cyclopean stone walls, and white-plastered yagura watchtowers remain, mirrored in still water beneath an open sky.

The free East Gardens are a lesson in restraint: a wooden guardhouse, a black pine pruned over generations into a living sculpture, a grove of labeled bamboo. The morning's walk drifted east and ended at the red-brick 1914 face of Tokyo Station — architect Tatsuno Kingo's Marunouchi masterpiece, lovingly restored.

In the leafy expanse of Ueno Park sits the Tokyo National Museum — founded in 1872, the oldest and largest museum in Japan, holding the country's deepest collection of art and antiquities. Its halls move quietly through a thousand years: serene wooden Buddhas and bodhisattvas perched on lotus thrones, their gilding worn back to warm bare wood.

Further in, the warrior's world — a suit of samurai armor crowned with golden horns, a single tachi blade laid on white cloth like a line of light. Then the human and the woven: a carved hooded monk, a gaunt ascetic, a modern bronze, and a blue silk kimono spread like a painting. A detailed scale model of a castle keep anchors the visit.

At 634 meters, Tokyo Skytree is the tallest tower in the world and Tokyo's broadcasting spine — a lattice of steel that lights each night in alternating themes, the violet "Miyabi" for elegance among them. From the observation deck the city becomes an endless circuit board of light spilling to every horizon, and the two of us pressed to the glass somewhere near the top of it all.

Asakusa is Tokyo's oldest district, a place where the city's deep history breathes through narrow streets and the persistent smell of incense. At its heart sits Sensoji (浅草寺), founded in 645 AD after two fishermen hauled a golden statue of Kannon — the Bodhisattva of Mercy — from the Sumida River. That miraculous catch became Tokyo's spiritual anchor. The iconic Kaminarimon gate announces your arrival with its great red lantern; beyond it, Nakamise-dōri leads you through centuries of vendors toward the main hall and five-story pagoda, all wrapped in the sensory chaos of incense, whispered prayers, and koyo — the autumn foliage that softens Asakusa's edges in deep November gold.

Kimono rental shops throughout Asakusa dress visitors in full traditional attire and connect them with professional photographers who know exactly which corners of the temple grounds catch the afternoon light, which gates frame the pagoda best, and which bamboo paths feel quietly removed from the crowds. The result is something between a portrait session and a time slip. Ako wore a red floral furisode with a green obi; Eddy, a black-and-gold diamond-patterned haori over a brown hakama. The wagasa went with Ako.

The last evening landed in Ningyōchō — "doll town," named for the puppet-theater craftsmen who once worked these lanes in old Shitamachi Tokyo. It has kept its low-rise, lantern-warm character and its old shops, and it makes a fitting place to raise a final glass: a flight of sake — Masumi, Zaku, and a third — poured to toast the end of the trip.