Tokyo is one of those cities that feel like another planet. In a single day you can cross the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world among thousands of people and giant screens in Shibuya, pray beneath an enormous red lantern at a 7th-century Buddhist temple in Asakusa, get lost among manga shops and seven-storey video game arcades in Akihabara, and end up eating yakitori in a post-war alley lit by little lanterns. It is the capital of hypermodernity and, at the same time, a city deeply rooted in its rituals and its courtesy.
What surprises most is not just its size, but how it works: trains that arrive to the second, spotless streets with hardly any bins, an almost ceremonial kindness and a level of safety that lets you walk around calmly at any hour. And a food scene like no other: Tokyo has more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other city in the world, but also a neighbourhood ramen, a market sushi or a bowl of curry that will make your day for just a few yen.
This guide explores Tokyo with a practical, warm eye: how to organise the neighbourhoods (which are almost cities in themselves), what to see and in what order, how to get around its maze of trains without stress, where to eat well and cheaply, and how to escape for a day to Kamakura, Nikko or Hakone. Tokyo is overwhelming at first, but with a bit of method it becomes one of the most memorable travel experiences there is.
Tokyo was born as Edo, a modest fishing village that received its first castle in 1457 at the hands of the lord Ota Dokan. Its fate changed in 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu chose it as the seat of his shogunate: for more than two and a half centuries, while the emperor remained in Kyoto, real power ruled Japan from Edo, which grew to more than a million inhabitants and became one of the largest cities in the world. In 1868, after the end of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration, the emperor moved from Kyoto to Edo Castle, the city was renamed Tokyo ('eastern capital') and embarked on rapid modernisation. The 20th century struck it twice with extreme violence: the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the American firebombing of 1945, which razed much of the city. From its ashes, Tokyo re-emerged as a symbol of the Japanese 'economic miracle', crowned by the 1964 Olympic Games and the first bullet train. Today it is a metropolis of more than 37 million people across its area. The full story, from Edo to the megalopolis, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Japan's political heart: from the fishing village called Edo to the Tokyo of 37 million, with Kamakura, Nikko and Hakone around it.
Read the history of Kanto (Tokyo and surroundings) →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 30 activities in Tokio. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It's hard to imagine that the largest metropolis on the planet began as a handful of fishermen's huts on a marshy delta. Before it was Tokyo, the city was called Edo, a name that means something like 'estuary entrance', after its location where the Sumida River flows into the bay. For centuries it was an unimportant place on the Kanto Plain, far from the centre of power, which lay in Kyoto, the imperial capital in the west of the country.
The first milestone came in 1457, when a vassal and strategist named Ota Dokan built a castle on a hill overlooking the bay. That modest fortress marked the spot where, centuries later, the heart of Japanese power would rise. Over the following century, while the country tore itself apart in the long period of civil wars known as Sengoku ('the country at war'), Edo remained a minor outpost in the hands of various feudal lords (daimyo).
Everything would change because of a decision by one of Japan's three great unifiers. In 1590, the powerful Toyotomi Hideyoshi handed the eastern provinces, Edo included, to an ambitious and patient ally named Tokugawa Ieyasu, perhaps intending to keep him away from the centre of power. Far from seeing it as exile, Ieyasu saw an opportunity: he turned that swampy castle into the base from which, a decade later, he would rule all of Japan.
In 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rivals at the decisive Battle of Sekigahara and took effective control of Japan. In 1603 the emperor, who in practice reigned but did not rule, named him shogun, the country's supreme military leader. Ieyasu set up his dynasty's government, the Tokugawa shogunate (or bakufu), not at the imperial court in Kyoto but at his own base: Edo. This created an unusual dual arrangement that would last more than two and a half centuries: the emperor, a sacred symbol, stayed in Kyoto, while real power sat in Edo.
Edo grew at a dizzying pace. The Tokugawa imposed a system called 'sankin-kotai', under which every feudal lord in the country had to keep a residence in Edo and spend alternate periods there, also leaving their families behind as de facto hostages. This filled the city with mansions, retinues, merchants and craftspeople who supplied that huge floating population of samurai. By the 18th century, Edo had more than a million inhabitants and was probably the most populous city in the world, ahead of London or Paris.
It was a long era of peace and a remarkably rich urban culture: kabuki theatre flourished, as did ukiyo-e woodblock prints (the famous images of the 'floating world' by artists such as Hiroshige, who portrayed the Edo of his day), popular literature and food. Sushi, tempura and soba as we know them were born largely as Edo street food. The country lived in almost total isolation from the outside world (the 'sakoku', or closed country, policy), a calm that would be shattered abruptly in the mid-19th century.
In 1853, the arrival in Edo Bay of the 'black ships' of US Commodore Matthew Perry, who demanded that Japan open its ports to trade, set off a crisis that would end up sweeping away the shogunate. Unable to resist pressure from the Western powers and squeezed by internal factions, Tokugawa power collapsed. In 1868, after a brief civil war, the last shogun gave up power and the emperor's authority was restored: this was the Meiji Restoration, one of the most decisive events in Japanese history.
That same year, the young Emperor Mutsuhito (who would reign under the era name Meiji, 'enlightened rule') made a highly symbolic decision: he moved his court from Kyoto to Edo Castle, which became the new imperial palace. The city was renamed Tokyo (東京), literally 'eastern capital', as a counterpart to Kyoto. For the first time in its history, political power and the emperor were in the same place.
In the Meiji era, Japan launched into rapid modernisation to avoid being colonised like other Asian countries: it adopted Western technology, institutions, military and industrial models at an astonishing pace. Tokyo filled up with brick buildings, trams, railways, electric light and banks. In just a few decades it went from being the capital of a closed feudal country to that of an emerging industrial power that would surprise the world by defeating Russia in 1905.
The 20th century struck Tokyo with extreme violence, and twice over. At midday on 1 September 1923, a huge earthquake shook the Kanto region just as thousands of families were cooking lunch over open fires. The fires that followed, fanned by the wind, destroyed much of Tokyo and neighbouring Yokohama and killed more than 100,000 people. It was one of the worst disasters in Japanese history. Amid the chaos and rumours, a wave of violence was also unleashed against the Korean community, with thousands of innocent victims, a dark episode that Japan came to acknowledge over time.
Barely rebuilt, the city faced its second tragedy. In the final phase of the Second World War, US aircraft subjected Tokyo to devastating firebombing raids. The worst came on the night of 9 to 10 March 1945, when hundreds of B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs on the dense wooden-house neighbourhoods of the low city. The resulting firestorm killed around 100,000 people in a single night (it is considered the deadliest conventional bombing raid in history) and left more than a million homeless. Much of Tokyo was reduced to ashes.
These two catastrophes explain why today's Tokyo, unlike Kyoto, has few old buildings left: almost everything you see was rebuilt in the 20th century. They also shaped its character: that of a city used to rising again and again from destruction.
From the ashes of 1945, Tokyo staged one of the most spectacular recoveries of the 20th century. First under Allied occupation and then through its own enormous effort, Japan rebuilt itself and launched into dizzying economic growth, the so-called 'Japanese economic miracle'. The city filled with new buildings, elevated expressways, metro lines and the headquarters of the big companies that would make 'Made in Japan' famous.
The symbolic moment of that rebirth was the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, the first held in Asia. For the world, they introduced a modern, peaceful, technologically cutting-edge Japan that was leaving the image of war behind. Timed to coincide with the Games, the first bullet train (shinkansen) in history opened between Tokyo and Osaka, a symbol of efficiency and the future that amazed the planet and is still an emblem of the country.
In the decades that followed, Tokyo became one of the world's financial capitals, the epicentre of the 1980s economic bubble (when land in the city centre reached astronomical prices) and then of the 'lost decades' of stagnation that followed the bubble's collapse in the 90s. Even so, the city kept reinventing itself: new districts such as Odaiba, Roppongi Hills and the redeveloped Shibuya changed its skyline, and Tokyo hosted the Olympics again in 2021 (the 2020 Games, postponed by the pandemic and held almost without spectators).
Today's Tokyo is hard to take in. Its metropolitan area, with more than 37 million inhabitants, is the most populous urban agglomeration in the world, and it runs with an efficiency that amazes every visitor: trains that arrive to the second, spotless streets, near-total safety and a remarkably orderly coexistence of that huge mass of people. Metropolitan Tokyo isn't an ordinary city but a mosaic of districts that are almost cities in their own right (Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ginza, Asakusa, Akihabara), each with its own personality.
It is also one of the planet's cultural and economic capitals: home to tech giants, a mecca for fashion and design, and the city with the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. The most futuristic cutting edge and carefully guarded tradition live side by side here with no apparent contradiction: a wooden Shinto shrine survives next to a glass skyscraper, the quiet of a Japanese garden slips in between office towers, and amid all the rush people still bow and keep up centuries-old rituals.
Few cities embody Japan's capacity for rebirth like Tokyo: from fishing village to the shogun's capital, from a city flattened twice in the 20th century to a megalopolis of the future. Walking its streets means glimpsing both the feudal past of Edo and one of the most advanced visions of what a great 21st-century city can be. That constant tension between memory and future is perhaps what makes Tokyo unforgettable.
