Tokyo: where to stay by neighbourhood

Tokyo is not one city but a loose federation of villages that happen to share a train map. Choosing where to sleep here matters more than in almost any other capital: a twenty-minute difference on the Yamanote line changes your mornings, your dinners and the kind of trip you come home describing. This is how we think about it.

Marunouchi and Otemachi: the calm centre

The blocks between Tokyo Station and the Imperial Palace moat are the city’s quietest luxury address. Offices empty at eight, the running track around the palace fills at dawn, and you are one stop from almost everywhere. Rooms here look over pine trees and water rather than neon, which is either exactly what you want or exactly what you do not.

Choose Marunouchi if it is your first visit, if you are combining Tokyo with the shinkansen to Kyoto, or if you simply sleep badly with a city outside the glass.

Ginza and Hibiya: for the eaters

Ginza is the reason people book flights. Within fifteen minutes on foot you have more three-star kitchens, basement sushi counters and eighth-floor tempura rooms than any comparable square kilometre on earth. The department-store food halls — Mitsukoshi, Matsuya — are worth an afternoon on their own.

In Tokyo you do not choose a hotel. You choose a twenty-minute radius, and then you choose a hotel inside it.

Our Japan editor

Roppongi and Azabu: art, and the long view

Roppongi shed its reputation a decade ago and is now, improbably, the art district: the Mori Art Museum, the National Art Center and 21_21 Design Sight sit within a triangle you can walk. The hotels here are tall and the views are the point — Tokyo Tower on one side, Shinjuku’s towers on the other, Fuji on a cold clear morning.

Shinjuku: the city at full volume

Stay in Shinjuku if you want Tokyo loud. Golden Gai’s sixty tiny bars, Omoide Yokocho’s grill smoke, the Kabukicho neon and a station that moves three and a half million people a day. It is exhausting and completely thrilling, and the west-side towers give you a hotel room above all of it.

A note on Shibuya

Shibuya has more new hotels than anywhere else in the city and the best nightlife for anyone under forty. It is also the single busiest place in Japan. Stay here if you want to be in the middle of the thing; stay one stop away in Daikanyama or Nakameguro if you want to visit it and then leave.

Daikanyama and Nakameguro: the quiet alternative

Two stops from Shibuya, these adjoining neighbourhoods are where Tokyo’s designers actually live. Daikanyama has low-rise streets of independent boutiques and the Tsutaya bookstore complex, which stays open until two in the morning and is worth an evening on its own. Nakameguro runs along a canal lined with cherry trees — in early April it is the most photographed kilometre in Japan, and for the other eleven months it is simply a very good place to eat.

There are few large hotels here, which is exactly the appeal: you stay small, walk everywhere and take the Toyoko line when you need the city.

Nihonbashi and Ningyocho: old Tokyo

East of the station, Nihonbashi is where Edo’s roads began — all distances in Japan are still measured from its bridge. The neighbourhood has been quietly reborn: knife shops and paper merchants that have traded for three hundred years, new towers with sky-high dining rooms, and a pace that feels a generation slower than Ginza, fifteen minutes away.

How to choose, in one paragraph

• First visit, seven days or fewer: Marunouchi or Ginza. Everything is reachable and nothing is a project.
• Here to eat: Ginza, Nihonbashi or Azabu. Walk home from dinner.
• Here for design and art: Roppongi or Nakameguro.
• Returning traveller: pick a residential neighbourhood — Kagurazaka, Yanaka, Meguro — and let the trains do the work.

Practical notes

• When to go: late March to April for blossom, and November for the clearest skies and the maples. June is wet; August is very hot.
• From the airport: Narita Express or the Keisei Skyliner from Narita (60–90 minutes); the monorail from Haneda (25 minutes). A car is slower than the train at almost every hour.
• Money: Japan is now broadly cashless, but the best small restaurants are proudly not. Carry ¥20,000.
• Reservations: many counters take bookings only through a hotel concierge. Ask the week you confirm your stay — and check availability for the rooms you want at the same time.

Getting around, and why it matters

The Yamanote loop circles central Tokyo in an hour and touches almost every neighbourhood above; the Ginza, Hibiya and Oedo subway lines fill in the rest. Trains stop around one in the morning, which shapes the evening more than any curfew — either plan to be home by midnight or plan to stay out until five, because there is very little in between and taxis after last train are expensive.

One practical consequence: a hotel on the loop is worth more than a slightly better hotel two changes away. Measure your shortlist in transfers, not in kilometres.

Where to stay

Three houses, three versions of the city: a grand address facing the palace gardens, a skyscraper icon above Shinjuku, and a modern ryokan with a rooftop hot spring in the middle of the financial district. All three sit within ten minutes of a Yamanote station; check availability early for the ryokan, which has fewer than a hundred rooms and a devoted following.