Tokyo: An Introduction

Praying at Asakusa Senso-ji Buddhist Temple

Describing what Tokyo does to you is harder than describing Tokyo itself. I first arrived in 2016, twenty-two years old, on a university summer program. No algorithm had pre-loaded my expectations. No curated feed had told me where to eat, what to photograph, which corner to stand on. I landed knowing almost nothing — and the city didn’t rush to introduce itself.

That’s what surprised me most. For a place so vast, so dense, so relentlessly alive, Tokyo is remarkably patient. It doesn’t reveal itself all at once. It opens slowly, street by street, shop by shop, step by step — and every time you think you’ve understood a corner of it, another layer appears.

I spent a month there and fell, without resistance, in love.

There’s something particular about encountering a place before the internet fully colonized the experience of travel. Tokyo in 2016 was still something you had to discover in real time, on foot, through wrong turns and lucky accidents. The matcha ice cream you eat standing still because walking and eating is considered rude. The temple you stumble into mid-morning, incense already thick in the air. The crossing at Shibuya that makes Times Square feel manageable. None of it was on a list I’d consulted.

Nine years later, I came back. This time with my boyfriend — his first trip to Japan. Watching him encounter the city for the first time, I recognized something I hadn’t expected: Tokyo does the same thing to everyone. The same slow unfolding. The same gradual surrender. The city has a way of getting under your skin, and it works every time.

What makes Tokyo genuinely unlike anywhere else isn’t any single thing. It’s the combination: a city almost entirely rebuilt after the Second World War, yet still carrying ancient layers in its temples, its etiquette, its rhythms. A place where a Buddhist shrine sits minutes from a neon-lit shopping district, where silence and chaos share the same block, where the ultramodern and the centuries-old don’t just coexist — they need each other.

Tokyo is enormous. More than 35 million people in the greater metropolitan area, a transit system so precise it redefines what punctuality means, neighborhoods so distinct they could be separate cities. The only way to read it is the same way you have to read New York: one neighborhood at a time, on foot, without too many expectations.

This is where we start.