Tokyo travel info

Stand by the ticket gates at Shinjuku Station at 8am on a weekday and Tokyo explains itself. People pour in from every direction and nobody collides. Trains arrive to the second, and each platform plays its own short departure jingle before cutting off mid-phrase. Twenty minutes away by train, a cat sleeps belly-down on a wall in the lanes of Yanaka, and at Senso-ji in Asakusa, old women scoop incense smoke from the great burner and pat it onto their hair.

As a place to eat, the city doesn't run out. Set lunches in station basements, eight-seat sushi counters, ramen shops with a queue at the ticket machine, monjayaki crisping onto a griddle in Tsukishima. The baseline is so high that it's genuinely hard to have a bad meal, which is the dangerous part.

Put a transit card on your phone and it covers the subway, the buses and the convenience-store till. Land on a Friday afternoon and you can be holding your first draft beer at a Shinjuku skewer bar that night.

Narita International Airport (NRT)

Haneda Airport (Tokyo International) (HND)