If you’re lucky enough to visit Tokyo, you have a challenge on your hands: you can only fit a finite number of activities in while you’re there. The difficulty is that there are so many amazing things to do and incredible places to see, which is why we recommend making an itinerary before you travel.
Here are the top 10 places that should definitely be included.
Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden
Japan is renowned for its beautiful gardens, and Tokyo is fortunate enough to host one of its most famous: Shinjuku Gyoen. A wonderland of blooms and beautiful landscapes, it’s crafted in a traditional style to create a feeling of serenity and oneness with nature. Formerly an imperial garden, it’s especially lovely to visit during the cherry blossom season.
Toyosu Fish Market
A fish market may seem a strange suggestion to include on this list, but Tokyo is famed for its sushi, and Toyosu is the absolute best place to taste it. Hosting a daily tuna auction, it’s bright, busy, and has thousands of tasty treats for food lovers to choose from.
The Robot Restaurant
Tokyo is a place unlike any other. With many of its innovations feeling delightfully futuristic to Westerners, it allows you to experience what the country’s biggest and most cosmopolitan cities have to offer.
Robot Restaurant is an ideal example. A high-tech cyborg extravaganza, this unique eatery is filled with flashing lights and crazy entertainment. If you want to visit somewhere truly one-of-a-kind, you have to eat there at least once.
Shinjuku’s pachinko parlours
One of the most popular entertainments in Japan is pachinko, an arcade game where balls are fired through a maze of metal pins. The aim is to get as many of these as possible into a central hole, and it’s popular for a reason. First built in the 1920s, pachinko is fairly ingrained into Japanese culture.
Representative of the wider embracing of gambling within the country, pachinko can be enjoyed both at specialist parlours and online, but it’s not the only entertainment available. With the growth of online technology, オンラインカジノ providers also offer plenty of slots, card, and dice games to appease the growing online casino market. The site even caters to the Japanese market by making use of historical and cultural items to enhance the experience.
If you want to play while you’re in Tokyo, try one of the amazing, neon-lit businesses in the Shinjuku district.
Tokyo National Museum
If you’d like to learn more about Tokyo’s incredible history, add Japan’s oldest museum to your list too. Covering over 100 acres, the site is filled with ancient shrines, temples, and more than 1,000 striking cherry blossom trees. Housing the world’s largest collection of Japanese artworks, it has over 110,000 artefacts for ardent history aficionados to discover.
Asakusa
If you like history and modernity combined, then visit the neighbourhood of Asakusa while you’re in the city. As well as its charming streets, which are lined with cute and quirky shops, it’s home to the sacred temple of Senso-ji. Featured in artwork from around the world, this is recognisable by its iconic red lantern and beautiful architectural design.
Kawaii Monster Café
If you want to add another unique destination to your itinerary, schedule in a stop at the Kawaii Monster Café. Hugely popular with both tourists and locals, this super colourful eatery was designed by a famous artist known as Sebastian Masuda. Vivid, edgy, and offering lots of photo opportunities, it has a menu filled with aesthetically pleasing and delicious dishes.
TeamLab Borderless
Ever visited a digital art museum before? If not, add TeamLab Borderless to your itinerary. Creating an immersive world where there’s no distinction between art and viewer, it invites you to step inside and explore these unique pieces for yourself. Covering over 10,000 square metres, you’ll find many Insta-worthy spots for snapping some holiday pictures.
Oedo Antique Market
If you’d like to do a spot of shopping while you’re in Tokyo, visit the bustling Oedo Antique Market for some totally unique pieces. Held outdoors in the open air, the fair runs twice a month, with hundreds of independent stallholders setting up shop. Everything you’ll find there is entirely one of a kind, making it the perfect place to pick up some incredibly special presents.
Akihabara
Last but not least, Akihabara. As the home and heartland of anime and manga, Tokyo has lots of great spots for picking up some new additions to your collection. These include ‘Electric Town’ – a wonderland of comics, DVDs, figurines, video games, and more. It’s also a great place to experience one of the area’s unique maid cafes.
Which of these 10 incredible destinations will you add to your itinerary?