Japan · 67 sights and 160 places to eat and drink, plus 72 bookable excursions, with why each earned a spot.
67 places
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (35K)
🌿Ueno Park
Nature
Tokyo's great democratic park packs a world-class cluster of museums, a zoo, a lotus-covered pond, and some of the city's most celebrated cherry trees…
Takeshita Street is a 350-metre pedestrian lane that has served as Tokyo's primary laboratory for youth fashion subcultures since the 1970s, and it st…
teamLab Planets is an immersive art institution where visitors wade barefoot through ankle-deep water that mirrors infinite light fields overhead, the…
Perched on the 52nd and 53rd floors of Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, this is one of Asia's most consequential contemporary art spaces, staging large-scal…
Tokyo Tower is the city's great romantic silhouette: a 333-metre lattice-steel structure painted in white and international orange that has anchored t…
Shinobazu Pond is a large natural lotus pond at the heart of Ueno, where in late summer the entire surface turns into a dense green-and-pink carpet of…
A narrow alley of smoke-blackened yakitori stalls tucked just west of Shinjuku Station, Omoide Yokocho (Memory Lane) compresses post-war Tokyo into ab…
Tokyo is a city of thirty-seven million people that somehow feels navigable, even intimate, once you learn to read its neighborhoods: the baroque elec…
A forested Shinto shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, Meiji Jingu draws you in long before you arrive: the approach along a broad gr…
The bronze Akita standing outside Shibuya Station is one of the most emotionally loaded meeting points in Japan, a figure so embedded in the city's da…
The stone foundations and towering walls of Edo Castle, now at the heart of the Imperial Palace East Garden, represent the grandest castle constructio…
One of Tokyo's great understated pleasures, the Nezu Museum in Minami-Aoyama holds a superb collection of pre-modern East Asian art assembled by Meiji…
One of Japan's oldest public art museums, located in Ueno Park with a striking semi-subterranean design by Kunio Maekawa that keeps its roofline low s…
Japan's oldest and largest museum spreads across five buildings in Ueno Park, housing the world's most comprehensive collection of Japanese art and an…
The Hozomon, or Treasure House Gate, is the great two-story inner gate of Senso-ji and the most photographed threshold in Asakusa: its massive red lan…
While the famous wholesale tuna auctions relocated to Toyosu, the outer market at Tsukiji remains one of the most exhilarating food streets in the wor…
At 634 metres, the Tokyo Skytree is the tallest tower in Japan and the centrepiece of a sprawling retail and entertainment complex in Sumida Ward that…
Kiyosumi Teien sits in the heart of the Fukagawa district and is the kind of quietly refined garden that rewards return visits more than first glances…
Yanaka Ginza is a narrow, old-fashioned shotengai (shopping street) that survived the wartime bombing of Tokyo, preserving a shitamachi atmosphere tha…
A tidal strolling garden built around two seawater ponds fed directly by Tokyo Bay, Hamarikyu delivers a quietly extraordinary experience: the water l…
The great red-and-black gate at the entrance to Senso-ji temple in Asakusa is the defining image of old Tokyo, its enormous paper lantern, roughly fou…
Tucked inside the sleek Tokyo Midtown complex in Roppongi, the Suntory Museum of Art is devoted to the idea that beauty lives in everyday life, with a…
Tokyo Disneyland is widely considered the gold standard of Disney parks worldwide, not because of its size but because of the extraordinary hospitalit…
NAMJATOWN is an indoor theme park inside Sunshine City in Ikebukuro that operates on gleeful, kitsch logic: a retro-styled town built entirely for eat…
At 634 metres, Tokyo Skytree is the tallest structure in Japan and the second-tallest in the world, and its two observation decks at 350 and 450 metre…
Japan's national natural history and science museum sits in Ueno Park and runs far deeper than its modest entrance suggests, with two interconnected b…
At 26 meters, Mt. Atago is the highest natural hill in the central wards of Tokyo, a distinction that sounds modest until you climb the dramatically s…
Geisha Komichi Alley in Asakusa is a narrow lantern-lit passage that transports you several decades back in one or two steps off the main tourist circ…
Jutting into Tokyo Bay on a man-made island, Odaiba Marine Park gives you something almost no other urban park in the world can: a sandy beach, the fu…
Ueno's sole UNESCO World Heritage building was designed by Le Corbusier and completed in 1959, making the architecture itself the first reason to visi…
Housed in a pristine 1933 Art Deco villa in Shirokanedai that was originally built as the residence of Prince Asaka, this is one of Tokyo's most archi…
Perched on top of a highway interchange where the Shuto Expressway loops above Meguro, this circular elevated garden is one of Tokyo's most pleasantly…
Shinjuku Gyoen holds three distinct garden styles within its 58-hectare grounds: a formal French parterre, an English landscape garden, and a traditio…
Japan's first national art museum, opened in 1952 and redesigned by Yoshiro Taniguchi, holds the country's most comprehensive collection of modern Jap…
🕑 Monday: Closed
modern artjapanese arthistoricpermanent collection
Tucked into Marunouchi's business district, this museum occupies a meticulous red-brick reconstruction of Tokyo's first Western-style office building,…
Kisho Kurokawa's final major work is a building worth visiting before you even look at what is on the walls: a sinuous glass facade of undulating conv…
The broad graveled plaza stretching from Nijubashi Bridge toward the outer moat of the Imperial Palace is the public forecourt of Japan's symbolic cen…
One of Tokyo's genuinely under-visited traditional stroll gardens, Higo-Hosokawa once served as the Edo-period residence of the Hosokawa clan, lords o…
Sandwiched between the elevated expressways and glass towers of Hamamatsucho, this Edo-period tidal garden is a small act of defiance against the surr…
🖼️teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM
Museum
teamLab's permanent digital art space in Azabudai Hills is a labyrinthine series of rooms with no fixed map and no walls as conventionally understood,…
Shibuya Sky sits atop the Shibuya Scramble Square tower at 229 metres and offers something the older observation decks do not: a largely open-air roof…
Sitting inside the outer gardens of the Imperial Palace in Kitanomaru Park, the National Museum of Nature and Science's older sibling focuses squarely…
Kame Ishi, meaning 'turtle stone,' is a large natural boulder in the grounds of the Imperial Palace East Garden that has served as a quiet landmark an…
Tokyo's largest water park stretches across the flat wetlands of Katsushika Ward, built around a network of ponds and channels fed by the Edogawa Rive…
A compact, participatory cultural experience in the heart of Asakusa designed primarily for international visitors curious about samurai and ninja his…
A quiet, tree-lined trail threading through one of Tokyo's green corridors, this kind of forest path offers a rare chance to feel the city drop away e…
Perched on the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku at the eighth floor, this full-scale Godzilla head looms over Kabukicho with the particul…
A single enormous Japanese black pine standing in the Imperial Palace East Garden, believed to be over 300 years old, is one of the quiet marvels of c…
Designed by Kenzo Tange and completed in 1991, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is the best free observation deck in the city, with twin tow…
Designed by Hayao Miyazaki himself as a place that feels discovered rather than visited, the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka is a small, eccentric building wh…
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (35K)
⛶ PHOTOS$
⛶ PHOTOS$$$★ 4.5 (56K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.3 (7.4K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (100K)
★ 4.2 (9.1K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.2 (15K)
⛶ PHOTOS
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.7 (53K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (27K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (1.5K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.3 (16K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.3 (7.6K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.5 (6.6K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.3 (16K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.5 (31K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (11K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.6 (3.2K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.2 (56K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (15K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (5.6K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.1 (12K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.5 (13K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (38K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.3 (2.7K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.6 (126K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 3.6 (1.6K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.5 (1.2K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.1 (17K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (119K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.5 (30K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (28K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.5 (3.3K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (808)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (10)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (16K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.5 (12K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (10K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.2 (3.8K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.4 (15K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.4 (4.9K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.2 (2K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.1 (73)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.6 (46K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.3 (7.7K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.4 (6.8K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.4 (3.9K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.4 (22K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.2 (4.6K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.4 (24)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (9.9K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (2.2K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.6 (99K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.3 (2.3K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$$★ 4.6 (30K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.6 (27K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.3 (1K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.1 (4.5K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (44)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.3 (7.3K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.4 (4.3K)
⛶ PHOTOS$$★ 4.9 (23K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.1 (11)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.4 (5.6K)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (317)
⛶ PHOTOS★ 4.5 (8.3K)
⛶ PHOTOS$★ 4.5 (20K)