Winter Tokyo on our first visit: wading through teamLab Planets, an afternoon in a micro pig cafe, Kabukicho neon and a skewer dinner in Shibuya.
Our first Tokyo was a winter one: cold, bright and completely uninterested in easing us in. It was all contrast. Knee-deep in projected light one day, knee-deep in Shinjuku crowds the next, with a mountain detour in between.
teamLab Planets in Toyosu: trousers rolled up, wading through a floor made of light along with everyone else.A micro pig cafe. You order a drink, a pig chooses your lap, and time quietly stops.Kabukicho by day, where the Samurai Restaurant billboard does the shouting for the whole street.Mid-crossing in Kabukicho, where every building is a stack of signs and someone is always filming.Dinner at a Shibuya counter: skewers arriving in waves, the chef two metres away, a purple drink under investigation.
When the city got too loud, we took a train into the mountains to meet the snow monkeys of Jigokudani. Highly recommended as a Tokyo palate cleanser.
We liked it enough to do the whole thing again in the heat. Two years later we were back: Tokyo, June 2026.
