D47 Shokudo Shibuya
GO ’26Set meals from Japan’s 47 prefectures, one region at a time; a teishoku education with the trains sliding by below Hikarie.
A Small Guide to Tokyo
東京 · toh-kyoh · Visited and curated by André
Please find my list of recommendations for a beautiful time in Tokyo below.
Eat
Set meals from Japan’s 47 prefectures, one region at a time; a teishoku education with the trains sliding by below Hikarie.
TSUKIJIRO Tsukiji
GO ’26Fresh seafood donburi at the Tsukiji outer market; a bowl of rice heaped with whatever landed that morning.
Yoshidaya Tachiaigawa
GO ’26A soba-kaiseki house in Tachiaigawa, as much for the garden as the food; handmade 100% buckwheat noodles, a signature duck soba, and proper tempura.
Coffee
Mameya Tokyo Omotesando
GO ’26Specialty beans from all over the world, weighed out at a standing counter; worth every second on your feet.
nadoya no katte Nishihara
GO ’26Glitch single-origin light roasts poured in a beautifully stripped-back old wooden house; a quiet garden, mismatched furniture, and open only at weekends.
Look
The Japan Folk Crafts Museum Komaba
GO ’26 ◎Mingei as a way of seeing: ordinary things, useful things, handmade things, given full attention.
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Roppongi
GO ’26 ◎Design treated as inquiry rather than lifestyle. A good room for seeing how Japan explains objects to itself.
Okuno Building Ginza
GO ’26 ◌Old Tokyo verticality: tiny galleries, worn corridors, and time still in the walls.
d47 MUSEUM Shibuya
GO ’26Design from all 47 prefectures, one exhibition at a time; the museum half of the d design travel project, up on the eighth floor of Hikarie.
Gōtoku-ji Setagaya
GO ’26The temple behind the beckoning cat; a hillside of white maneki-neko left as wishes, thousands of them, every one with a paw raised.
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Kitanomaru
GO ’26A century of Japanese modern art beside the palace moat; the fourth-floor room framing the Imperial garden is its own quiet exhibit.
The Sumida Hokusai Museum Ryogoku
GO ’26Hokusai returned to the Sumida streets where he was born; a deep collection behind Kazuyo Sejima’s angular, mirror-aluminium skin.
Architecture
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Roppongi
GO ’26Low, precise, and partly hidden. Architecture behaving more like a cut in the ground than a monument.
The National Art Center, Tokyo Roppongi
GO ’26Kisho Kurokawa’s undulating glass wall breathing along the street; a museum with no permanent collection, all space and light.
Shop
Maruni Higashi-Nihonbashi
GO ’26Furniture, wood, proportion, restraint. A room where design feels slower than the city outside.
LAMMAS / ISTINTO Toranomon
GO ’26Cheese next door to wine; the kind of small specialization a city needs.
NISHIGUCHI KUTSUSHITA Tokyo store Asakusabashi
GO ’26Socks made like a craft, by people who treat the everyday as worth the care.
Tokyobike Yanaka
GO ’26City bikes built for cruising Tokyo rather than conquering it; the Yanaka shop carries the same unhurried idea into the neighbourhood around it.
Azmaya Minami-Aoyama
GO ’26Everyday Japanese homeware with quiet conviction; copper, brass, wood, and glass made to be used for decades. A few minutes from the Nezu.
Nakagawa Masashichi Shibuya
GO ’26The Shibuya branch of the 1716 Nara house; traditional craft made to live with now, from hemp cloth to small everyday objects.
d47 design travel store Shibuya
GO ’26Regional design shelved by prefecture, up in Hikarie; the d design travel guides turned into objects you can carry home.
fog linen work Shimokitazawa
GO ’26Washed linen for the everyday; cloth, aprons, bags, and quiet homeware from the studio that made it feel ordinary again.
Maruzen Marunouchi
GO ’26A grand multi-floor bookshop by Tokyo Station, in the Oazo building; foreign titles and stationery, and a café that claims to have invented hayashi rice.
TRADMAN’S BONSAI Marunouchi
GO ’26Bonsai with a streetwear attitude; old trees restyled for a younger Tokyo and shown like sculpture.
Okume Tsukiji
GO ’26 ◎Duck into the hidden market behind the fish market for Okume, dried-goods sellers since 1871; pick your dashi from katsuobushi, kombu, and dozens of options weighed out at the counter.
Beyond
Kamakura Kanagawa
GO ’26 ◎The old coastal capital an hour south, worth the ride alone on the Enoden line that threads between houses and the sea. Hike the wooded hills from Kita-Kamakura to Sasuke Inari, a hidden shrine of red torii and white foxes where Yoritomo dreamed the army that made him shogun; then Kōtoku-in’s Great Buddha in Hase, bronze and open to the sky since a tsunami took its hall.
Kanazawa Ishikawa
GO ’26Two and a half hours north by shinkansen; the preserved samurai lanes of Nagamachi and SANAA’s round, wall-less 21st Century Museum, where Leandro Erlich’s pool lets you stand under the water.