The person writing this
I’m Tomo. From 2015 to 2024 I lived in Tokyo — nine years, nearly all of it in and around Shibuya and Shinjuku. My school was there. Later my office was there. For nine years that area wasn’t somewhere I visited. It was where I bought groceries and missed last trains.
In 2024 I moved to Niigata, on the other side of the country. I still go back to Tokyo several times a year.
So I’m not a Tokyo resident writing about his city, and I’m not a tourist who spent a week there. I lived in that neighbourhood for nine years and I keep going back.
I don’t put my face on this site. Every photo on it, I took myself.
I moved in the year Godzilla did
I arrived in Tokyo in 2015 — the year the Godzilla head appeared over Kabukicho. I left in 2024. In between, both neighbourhoods were taken apart and rebuilt, and I was living a few streets away the whole time.
Groceries, meeting friends, eating, walking around with nothing particular to do: all of it happened between Shibuya and Shinjuku. I wasn’t commuting in and out. I lived in it.
Hachiko and the scramble crossing are on that map too. For most people they’re the photo you take on your first day. For me they were the way to work, and the place I stood around on a Saturday with nothing planned.
Then came one month at the end of 2019. Shibuya got its rooftop observation deck, Shibuya Sky, and three weeks later the rebuilt Shibuya PARCO opened with Japan’s first official Nintendo store and a Pokémon Center inside it. I wasn’t watching that from a distance — I queued outside the Nintendo store for a Switch in a colour you could only buy there, and stood in front of the Mewtwo at the Pokémon Center entrance like everyone else.
Shinjuku changed too, and in a way that matters more than it sounds. Until July 2020 you couldn’t get from the east side of the station to the west without passing through a ticket gate or walking all the way around outside. Then the free passage opened and the geography of the station changed. Plenty of English-language guides still describe the old version.
That’s the part a week-long visit can’t give you: not just what’s there, but what changed — and what that means when you’re standing in the station trying to work out where to go.
Why this site exists
Information about Tokyo splits into two kinds: what you can look up, and what you only know if you’ve lived there.
Which exit to take out of Shinjuku Station. What the ticket machine screen does after you press the first button. Whether that eight-seat yakitori place has anywhere to put your bag. Whether the street is still busy at 11pm or whether you’ll be the only person on it.
After nine years, that second kind becomes so obvious you stop noticing it. It’s also the kind almost nobody writes down in English. That gap is what this site is for.
The photos are mine
Every photo on this site was taken by me, on location. No stock photography. Nothing pulled from other sites.
I only write about places I’ve been to. Where I haven’t been, I say so. I don’t write guides assembled from other people’s guides — there are already enough of those.
Prices come with a date
Every price and every set of opening hours on this site carries the date I checked it, on the official site or on the sign at the door.
Tourist information in Japan goes stale faster than you’d expect. Admission prices go up, hours change, places move. Something written eight months ago is often already wrong.
So here’s my honest advice: if an article doesn’t tell you when its prices were checked, don’t trust them. That includes articles on this site. If you find something here that’s out of date, tell me.
Not living there any more is part of the point
I don’t live in Tokyo now, and I’ve come to think that’s half of why this site is useful.
When you live somewhere, the difficult parts quietly stop existing. You don’t read the ticket machine — your hands do it. You don’t check opening hours, you just walk past and look. You never hunt for a coin locker, because your bag is at home. All the things a visitor spends their first day struggling with are invisible to you.
Now I arrive at the airport like everybody else. I work out the train in from Narita. I pull a suitcase through Shinjuku Station and look for somewhere to leave it. I book hotels in streets I used to live on and find out what they’re actually like as a guest. I get things wrong and have to check.
So the site is written from both sides: nine years of knowing where everything is, and the experience — several times a year — of turning up as a visitor and having to work it out again.