Four Days in Tokyo, a First Timer's Route Built on the City's Two Halves

Four days is enough to see the Tokyo that matters on a first trip, but only if you stop planning by a wishlist and start planning by geography. The city behaves like two cities, an older east around Asakusa and Ueno and a newer west around Shinjuku and Shibuya, and most four day plans fall apart on the trains between them, not on the sights. Give each day to one half, keep the last day short for the airport, and this four day Tokyo itinerary hands you back most of a day.

Tokyo Runs East and West, and Your Itinerary Should Too

The single mistake that wrecks a first Tokyo trip is treating the map as one blur and hopping across it. Asakusa and Ueno sit in the older eastern city, the shitamachi, where the buildings run low and the streets keep their old grain. Shinjuku and Shibuya sit in the newer west, all towers and crossings. String a temple in the east to a crossing in the west to a bay island in the same afternoon and you spend that afternoon underground.

Two details make the split worse if you ignore them. Tokyo's subway is run by two separate companies, Tokyo Metro and Toei, and switching between them can mean tapping out and back in through the gates, so a route that zigzags between operators leaks minutes all day. A Suica or Pasmo card handles both with a tap and spares you buying a ticket each time. And a nationwide rail pass, the one people buy on reflex, cannot be used on the Tokyo subway at all, which makes it a classic waste for a trip that never leaves the city. If it helps to see the areas laid out before you commit, the area view for Tokyo is a faster way to picture the split than a list of pins.

Day One, the Old Eastern City From Sensoji to the Skytree

Start in the east while your body clock still has you up early. Sensoji, in Asakusa, is the oldest temple in Tokyo, founded in 645, and from its outer gate, the Kaminarimon, hangs a red lantern of around 700 kilograms. From that gate the Nakamise Shopping Street runs more than 200 metres to the inner Hozomon gate, lined with sweets and souvenirs. Come at opening. By midday the Nakamise moves at the speed of the crowd, and after dark, once the day crowd thins, the lit grounds are worth a second pass.

From Asakusa the Tokyo Skytree stands a short hop east in Sumida. At 634 metres it is the tallest tower in the world, with viewing floors near 350 and 450 metres, and the 634 is a pun, reading as Musashi, the old name for the region. The honest catch is the sky. On a clear day the deck opens toward Mount Fuji, but on a grey one the value drops hard, so check the weather before you buy the height and keep the temple as your anchor either way.

Day Two, Ueno's Museums and the Yanaka Backstreets

Give the second day to Ueno and the quiet streets just north of it. Ueno Park opened in 1873 on the former grounds of Kaneiji temple and holds around 800 cherry trees, which makes it one of the most crowded places in the city on a spring weekend and a calm morning walk the rest of the year. Inside it, the Tokyo National Museum, founded in 1872, anchors a cluster of museums and is the safest card in this whole itinerary for a wet or brutally hot day. It is quietest right after opening.

Then walk the day down a gear. Yanaka Ginza is a low retro shopping street, around 170 metres of lantern-lit shops, in the Yanaka district. This is part of Yanesen, the pocket of Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi that came through both the war and the great earthquake with its old shitamachi bones intact. It wakes up in the late afternoon, so this is where the day should end, not begin. These are lived-in streets, not a set, and the alleys stay narrow.

Day Three, Shinjuku Across to Shibuya and Harajuku

Cross to the west and take it in a line. Shinjuku Gyoen spans the Shinjuku and Shibuya wards across 58.3 hectares and folds a French formal garden, an English landscape garden and a Japanese garden into one plot, which means the crowd spreads thin in a way Ueno's cannot. It is a paid garden with its own rules, so this is somewhere to walk, not to spread a picnic.

Push south to Harajuku for Meiji Jingu, the shrine built in 1920 for Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. The forest around it looks ancient and is not. It was planted from scratch with around 100,000 trees of more than 350 species, carried in from across the country and set in the ground by volunteers. Go early, when the gravel underfoot is the loudest thing there. Close the day at the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, where five roads meet and Guinness records the world's busiest pedestrian crossing, with as many as 3,000 people moving on a single signal. Evenings, especially Fridays, are the peak, and the cleanest view down onto it is from an upper floor of one of the buildings around it rather than the pavement. If you fold in Takeshita Street in Harajuku, a 350 metre lane of teen fashion and street food, do it on a weekday, because a weekend afternoon there pins you to walking pace.

Day Four, the Imperial Gardens and a Short Walk to the Water

Keep the last day short and central, since the airport eats the back half of it. The Imperial Palace East Gardens sit on the former honmaru, ninomaru and sannomaru of Edo Castle and are the only part of the palace grounds open to the public. The castle's great keep burned in 1657 and was never rebuilt, but its enormous stone base survives and you can climb it. The trap here is the calendar. The gardens close on Mondays and Fridays, so if your fourth day lands on either, swap the order of the days.

From there it is a natural drift toward the water at Hamarikyu Gardens, an Edo era daimyo garden on the bay. Its tidal pond rises and falls with the sea and is the only saltwater pond left in Tokyo, with a teahouse set out on an island in the middle. A water bus on the Sumida River connects Asakusa to Hamarikyu, which makes a gentler start to a departure morning than one more train across town.

What to Cut First When the Forecast Turns

Rain does less damage if you decide in advance which day it takes. The instinct that fails is trying to fix a wet morning with teamLab or the Ghibli Museum on the spot, because both are advance booking and the Ghibli Museum sells nothing at the door at all. If the forecast is bad, pull the indoor cards forward and push the gardens back. The Ueno museums are the reliable shelter. So is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building observation deck in Shinjuku, which is indoor, free and high enough to read the city on a flat grey day. Covered markets like Ameyoko under the elevated tracks and the kitchenware shops of Kappabashi also stay walkable when it pours.

Where a Day Trip Fits, and Where It Quietly Ruins the Week

On a first four day trip a day trip almost always costs more than it returns, because it lifts a whole day out of a city you have barely started. If the pull is strong, weigh them honestly. The easiest by far is Kawagoe, whose Edo era warehouse street sits a short ride out. Kamakura pairs the great bronze Buddha of Kotoku-in, more than 13 metres tall, with a stretch of coast. Hakone only pays off on a clear day, when Mount Fuji shows over the lake, and even then it runs tight inside a single day. Heaviest of the lot is Nikko, the UNESCO shrine and temple complex, about two hours out each way. The clean answer for a first visit is to save all of them for a return, and if you insist on one, spend it on day four when your flight is late, knowing you are trading the Imperial gardens for it.

Turning a Saved List Into a Dated Route

By the time you have read three guides your saved list is longer than any four days can hold, and the hard part stops being what to see and becomes what order to see it in. That is the gap Trip Pagoda is built to close. Browse a starting shape in the trip recipes, save the places that survive this east and west split, then let My Trip sort them into four days, keeping each day inside one half of the city so you are walking a neighbourhood rather than crossing town, with sensible time slots, a rough budget, and a wet-weather version of each day already worked out. The pile of pins becomes a route you can actually walk, east one day and west the next.