Tokyo for the
Returning Visitor.

The returning visitor knows what tired-on-arrival in Tokyo feels like. We do not anchor a temple on the first day. We anchor a hotel in a neighbourhood that is itself the activity — Yanesen if you want the quiet east side, Yoyogi if you want the park-and-coffee belt, Nihonbashi if you want to walk to dinner in old Tokyo. Drop the bags, walk one loop, eat early.

The desk's standing rule on arrival is one neighbourhood, one meal, in bed by ten.

Yanesen — Yanaka, Nezu, Sendagi — is the quarter that was overlooked by the post-war redevelopment, and the result is a forty-block neighbourhood that still has wooden eaves, working sentōs, a cat colony at the cemetery, and one old commercial street called Yanaka Ginza. Walking it takes the morning. The desk anchors the day at the bookshops, Nezu Shrine for the azaleas in May, and SCAI The Bathhouse — a contemporary art gallery built into a sentō that closed in 1993.

Lunch is a small soba house near the cemetery; afternoon is the slope to Yuyake Dandan (the sunset staircase) and the return to the hotel by way of Ueno Park, which is on the way home.

The JR Chūō line goes west out of Shinjuku to Kichijōji, the city's best-loved suburb. The reason to come is Inokashira Park — fifty acres around a pond, paddle-boats, cherry trees, and a small zoo with a hundred-year-old elephant who died in 2016 (the keepers' grief is part of the neighbourhood's memory). Behind the park, the suburb runs as a low-rise grid of bookshops, jazz cafés, and Harmonica Yokocho — an alley of tiny bars left from the post-war black market.

The Studio Ghibli Museum sits on the western edge of the park. The lottery opens on the 10th of the month for visits 90 days later; we set the calendar reminder when the trip is booked, not on the day. If you missed the lottery, the museum's gift shop is open without entry — the building from outside is worth the walk.

Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, on the east bank of the Sumida, was a fishing district two hundred years ago. Today it has the city's third-best Edo-period garden, a museum that recreates the old town in life-size, and — implausibly — the flagship Blue Bottle Coffee in a converted warehouse three minutes from the metro station. The neighbourhood is unhurried; the cherry trees along the canal behind the garden bloom a week later than the rest of Tokyo.

Lunch is at Tomoegata, a 200-year-old chankonabe (sumo stew) house near the Ryōgoku Kokugikan, two stops away. Afternoon returns to Kiyosumi for the Fukagawa Edo Museum — a one-room indoor reconstruction of an 1840s Fukagawa street, complete with the smell of cooking smoke.

Roppongi is famous for nightlife; we ignore that and use the day. Inside a fifteen-minute walking radius sit three of Tokyo's most considered museums: 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo Midtown (architecture by Tadao Ando, exhibitions curated by Issey Miyake's foundation), the National Art Center Tokyo (Kisho Kurokawa's last building, no permanent collection, only temporary exhibitions), and the Mori Art Museum on the 53rd floor of Roppongi Hills. The desk's rule is two of the three, not all three — the eye gets tired.

Evening: walk down the slope to Azabu-juban for taiyaki at Naniwaya Honten (the original, opened 1909) and dinner at a yakitori counter on the hill. The Mori building's 52nd-floor open-air "Tokyo City View" deck is open until 22:00 — the last view before tomorrow morning's flight.