Tokyo

D47 Shokudo Shibuya ’26

Set meals from Japan’s 47 prefectures, one region at a time; a teishoku education with the trains sliding by below Hikarie.

TSUKIJIRO Tsukiji ’26

Fresh seafood donburi at the Tsukiji outer market; a bowl of rice heaped with whatever landed that morning.

Yoshidaya Tachiaigawa ’26

A soba-kaiseki house in Tachiaigawa, as much for the garden as the food; handmade 100% buckwheat noodles, a signature duck soba, and proper tempura.

Mameya Tokyo Omotesando ’26

Specialty beans from all over the world, weighed out at a standing counter; worth every second on your feet.

nadoya no katte Nishihara ’26

Glitch single-origin light roasts poured in a beautifully stripped-back old wooden house; a quiet garden, mismatched furniture, and open only at weekends.

The Japan Folk Crafts Museum Komaba ’26 ◎

Mingei as a way of seeing: ordinary things, useful things, handmade things, given full attention.

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Roppongi ’26 ◎

Design treated as inquiry rather than lifestyle. A good room for seeing how Japan explains objects to itself.

Okuno Building Ginza ’26 ◌

Old Tokyo verticality: tiny galleries, worn corridors, and time still in the walls.

d47 MUSEUM Shibuya ’26

Design 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 ’26

The 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 ’26

A 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 ’26

Hokusai returned to the Sumida streets where he was born; a deep collection behind Kazuyo Sejima’s angular, mirror-aluminium skin.

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Roppongi ’26

Low, precise, and partly hidden. Architecture behaving more like a cut in the ground than a monument.

The National Art Center, Tokyo Roppongi ’26

Kisho Kurokawa’s undulating glass wall breathing along the street; a museum with no permanent collection, all space and light.

Maruni Higashi-Nihonbashi ’26

Furniture, wood, proportion, restraint. A room where design feels slower than the city outside.

LAMMAS / ISTINTO Toranomon ’26

Cheese next door to wine; the kind of small specialization a city needs.

SyuRo Torigoe ’26 ◌

Objects for daily life, if the room lives up to the promise.

NISHIGUCHI KUTSUSHITA Tokyo store Asakusabashi ’26

Socks made like a craft, by people who treat the everyday as worth the care.

Tokyobike Yanaka ’26

City 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 ’26

Everyday 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 ’26

The 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 ’26

Regional design shelved by prefecture, up in Hikarie; the d design travel guides turned into objects you can carry home.

fog linen work Shimokitazawa ’26

Washed linen for the everyday; cloth, aprons, bags, and quiet homeware from the studio that made it feel ordinary again.

Maruzen Marunouchi ’26

A 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 ’26

Bonsai with a streetwear attitude; old trees restyled for a younger Tokyo and shown like sculpture.

Okume Tsukiji ’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.

Kamakura Kanagawa ’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 ’26

Two 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.