4 Days in Tokyo

Begin a first trip where the city began. Senso-ji, founded in 628, is Tokyo's oldest temple, and the first hour after sunrise is the only time the long Nakamise approach is anywhere near empty. Walk in under the giant red lantern of the Kaminarimon, past the rice-cracker and souvenir stalls, to the incense cauldron and the main hall, the five-story pagoda off to the left. Loop back through Nakamise for a warm ningyo-yaki, a little red-bean sponge cake, once the shutters roll up.

Pair the temple with the tower across the Sumida, a flat twenty-minute walk with the spire ahead the whole way. At 634m it is the tallest tower in the world, and a date-and-time ticket bought online for the 350m Tembo Deck skips both the counter line and the same-day surcharge. Hold off on the upper 450m gallery unless the sky is sharp; on a clear morning the lower deck already gives you Mt. Fuji on the western horizon.

Lunch is grazed on your feet in the open-air market crammed under the Yamanote tracks. Run it from the Ueno end toward Okachimachi, where the stalls get louder and the seafood fresher: grilled scallops, fat strawberries on a stick, a standing bowl of chirashi. It began as a postwar black market and still trades like one, so keep cash handy and do not expect anywhere to sit down.

A wide green breath two minutes uphill from the market. The free walk is the Shinobazu Pond loop, thick with lotus in summer, and the little Bentendo hall on its island; the museums and the zoo around the rim charge separately and mostly close on Mondays. Come in late March and the central avenue is one of the city's great cherry-blossom tunnels, and one of its most crowded.

Open the modern day with its calmest hour, inside a forest that is not natural at all: 100,000 trees were donated from across Japan in the 1920s to plant it. A few steps up the wide gravel approach from the Harajuku torii, the city noise drops away. The stacked wall of painted sake barrels is the photo everyone takes; the 500-yen inner garden earns the fee only in mid-June, when the irises bloom. With luck you will catch a Shinto wedding procession crossing the main courtyard.

Straight across the road from the shrine and a hard switch in volume: a few hundred metres of teen fashion, secondhand racks, and rainbow everything, packed shoulder to shoulder. Walk it once before noon while it is merely busy, get a folded crepe or a cloud of cotton candy from one of the original stands, and let it funnel you out the far end. You are here for ten minutes of sensory overload, not to shop; the better browsing waits on the way out.

From Takeshita's noise to the calm. Omotesando is a broad, zelkova-lined avenue of flagship architecture, the Tadao Ando-designed Omotesando Hills and the glass Dior and Tod's stores all free to admire from the pavement. Duck onto Cat Street, the car-free backstreet angling toward Shibuya, for an unhurried lunch and the low-rise boutiques locals actually shop. It is the easy, walkable middle of the day, and it carries you most of the way to the crossing on foot.

Honest take first: from the pavement the world's busiest crossing is a very large intersection. Cross it once in the surge for the feeling of it, then see it properly from above; the second-floor window of the station-front Starbucks looks straight down the scramble for the price of a coffee. The loyal-dog Hachiko statue, Tokyo's default meeting spot, sits thirty seconds away in the same plaza, with the crossing dead ahead, so you knock out both in one stop.

The open-air rooftop on top of the station, and the day's finale. You have had the Skytree's enclosed height; this is the opposite, an unguarded edge 229m up with the wind and the whole western sprawl below, Fuji on the skyline on a clear evening. Book online days ahead and take a sunset slot, the rooftop deck is the draw and those windows sell out first. Go straight to the southwest corner before the line for it builds, and stay for blue hour as the crossing lights up far below.

Breakfast where Tokyo has bought its fish for nearly a century. The wholesale tuna auction left for Toyosu in 2018, so come to eat rather than to watch a spectacle: a few hundred stalls sell tamagoyaki on a stick, grilled scallops in the shell, uni straight from the tray, and tuna over rice. Follow the queues of locals over the tour flags, arrive by 8:30 before the best stalls sell out, and bring cash, because many take nothing else.

A 300-yen Edo-era garden a ten-minute walk from the market, built around a tidal saltwater pond that still rises and falls with Tokyo Bay. Order the matcha and a seasonal sweet at Nakajima-no-Ochaya, the teahouse on its own island, and drink it with the Shiodome towers stacked behind the garden's 300-year-old pine, the city's tidiest old-meets-new view. A river-bus pier inside the garden runs boats up the Sumida to Asakusa if you would rather float than ride the train.

Lunch and a wander through Tokyo's grande-dame shopping district, where you do not have to buy anything to enjoy it. The 13th-floor rooftop garden at Ginza Six is a free lawn-and-bench break with skyline views, Itoya is twelve floors of beautiful stationery for light, packable souvenirs, and the 1932 Wako clock tower over the 4-chome crossing is the district's landmark. Come on a weekend afternoon and the main Chuo-dori closes to traffic and fills with strollers.

The free, green heart of the city, and the part of central Tokyo most short plans skip. These are the inner grounds of Edo Castle, once the largest fortress in the world: climb the mossy stone base of the vanished main keep for the view, cross the formal Ninomaru garden of clipped pines, and stand in real quiet a few minutes from Tokyo Station. The gardens close on Mondays and Fridays, so they fall naturally on the other days of this trip; last entry is about thirty minutes before the gates shut.

End the city days barefoot in the dark, wading shin-deep through warm water while koi painted in light scatter at your feet and a mirrored room of orchids opens overhead. teamLab Planets sits out at Toyosu on the bay, the last stretch a ride on the driverless, elevated Yurikamome, and an evening slot is the right way to close a long day on your feet. Book a timed ticket well ahead, weekend and evening windows go first, wear shorts or trousers you can roll above the knee rather than a long skirt, and give it the full two hours.

About 85 minutes from Shinjuku on the Odakyu Romancecar to Hakone-Yumoto, then the switchbacking Hakone Tozan mountain railway up to Chokoku-no-Mori. The Open-Air Museum scatters Henry Moore and other bronzes across a hillside lawn with the mountains behind them, plus a stained-glass 'Symphonic Sculpture' tower you climb and a separate pavilion of Picasso ceramics. There is a free hot-spring foot bath fed by the local springs, so carry a small towel. Admission is 2,000 yen, or 1,800 if you book online, and is often discounted with the Hakone Free Pass.

Carry on by cable car and ropeway to the lip of a volcanic valley still venting sulphur steam from the eruption that shaped it. The thing to eat is a kuro-tamago, an egg boiled in the spring water until its shell turns coal-black; local lore says one adds seven years to your life, and a small bag of them costs about 500 yen. On a clear day the ropeway car frames Mt. Fuji dead ahead. Check the ropeway status before you set out, it closes on high-gas or high-wind days, with a bus substituted.

Ride the ropeway down to Togendai and cross Lake Ashi on one of the mock-galleon sightseeing boats, a 30-to-40-minute glide toward Moto-Hakone with Mt. Fuji rising over the far shore on a clear day. The lake lies in the caldera of the same old volcano, and the crossing is both the most scenic leg of the loop and, with the Free Pass, one you have already paid for. Sit on the open upper deck for the Fuji view and the red lake torii coming up ahead.

From the boat dock it is a ten-minute walk through cedar forest to Hakone Jinja, a shrine founded here in 757 at the foot of the mountain. The shrine halls sit up a long lantern-lined stone staircase, but the image everyone comes for is the Heiwa-no-Torii, the vermilion 'gate of peace' standing in the water at the lake's edge with Fuji behind it. There is usually a queue for the photo on the little jetty; from the shore the view is free either way. A bus runs from here back to Hakone-Yumoto, where a day-use onsen and the Romancecar home make the right end to the day.