Tokyo 7 Day Itinerary
Robot Restaurant in Kabukicho, the neon-and-drums spectacle that used to close out every Shinjuku night in guidebooks, shut down for good in 2023. If a hostel flyer still points you there, ignore it; the building’s been converted to something else entirely. That single closure has quietly outdated most Tokyo itineraries still floating online, so treat any Shinjuku evening plan with a healthy dose of double-checking before you show up.
Day 1: Shinjuku
Base yourself in Shinjuku for the first stretch of the trip; it’s the single best transit hub in the city and everything else is a short ride away. Breakfast on Takeshita Street style crepes or coffee is fine for day one, but save your appetite, because Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden deserves the whole morning rather than a rushed walk-through. It’s one of the few spots in central Tokyo where you can genuinely forget you’re in a city of 14 million people, and the greenhouse alone justifies the entry fee.
Meiji Shrine in the afternoon sits inside its own forest, planted deliberately a century ago and now dense enough that traffic noise disappears within a few hundred meters of the entrance. Skip anything billed as an art museum stop here unless it’s specifically on your list; Shinjuku’s museum offerings are thin compared to what’s coming later in the week.
For dinner, Golden Gai is still the move, a warren of alleyways packed with tiny bars seating six to eight people each. Some are tourist-friendly, some post a locals-only sign in Japanese at the door; if in doubt, look for an English menu taped up before you duck in. Do not go looking for Robot Restaurant. It’s gone.
Day 2: Asakusa and Akihabara
Senso-ji Temple in the morning is Tokyo’s oldest temple and its busiest, so arrive before 8am if you want photos without a hundred strangers in frame. Walk Nakamise shopping street on the approach for rice crackers and small souvenirs, but save your real food budget for lunch.
Ride the Ginza Line to Akihabara for the afternoon. Electric Town is exactly the sensory overload it promises, floors of anime merchandise, retro game shops, and electronics stacked to the ceiling. Mandarake is worth an hour even if you’re not buying, purely for the scale of the secondhand manga and collectibles inside.
For dinner, Kanda Yabu Soba is one of the oldest soba houses in the city and does the simple stuff, cold soba with dipping sauce, better than almost anywhere else in Tokyo. It’s not flashy and that’s the point.
Day 3: Tsukiji, not Toyosu, for breakfast, and Odaiba after
Here’s where a lot of guides get it wrong. The famous tuna auction and the big wholesale sushi counters, Sushi Dai and Daiwa Sushi included, moved from Tsukiji to Toyosu back in 2018. If you want to see the actual auction, you need a reservation at Toyosu and a 4:30am start. But Tsukiji’s outer market never closed, and it remains one of the best street food crawls in the city, standing sushi counters, grilled skewers, tamagoyaki stalls, all still running most mornings. Go before 9am for the freshest food and thinnest crowds, and check ahead since the outer market closes on Sundays and Wednesdays.
From Tsukiji, head to Odaiba for the afternoon. The teamLab digital art experience relocated in February 2024 to Azabudai Hills, not Odaiba anymore, so if teamLab is the actual draw for your day, redirect there instead; tickets run around 3,800 to 4,800 yen for an adult and sell out on weekends, so book online days ahead. If you stick with Odaiba itself, the Ferris wheel and the waterfront view of Rainbow Bridge are still worth the trip on a clear evening, just go in with the right expectations about what’s actually there now.
Day 4: Shibuya and Harajuku
Shibuya Scramble Crossing lives up to the hype precisely once, when you’re standing in the middle of it with everyone else. The Hachiko statue nearby draws a permanent crowd for photos; don’t fight for the perfect shot, a few steps back gets you the same scene with less elbow contact.
Harajuku in the afternoon is Takeshita Street’s fashion chaos followed by a sharp turn into Meiji Shrine’s calm if you didn’t already do it on day one. If you’re after quieter, more interesting shopping than Takeshita’s main strip, Cat Street running parallel has better independent boutiques with a fraction of the foot traffic.
Dinner should be tonkatsu somewhere in the neighborhood; a good crispy pork cutlet with shredded cabbage and miso soup is one of the most underrated meals in Japan and rarely gets top billing next to sushi and ramen.
Day 5: Roppongi
Mori Art Museum sits at the top of Roppongi Hills and pairs a genuinely strong rotating contemporary art program with an observation deck view over the city that beats Tokyo Tower’s for the price of admission. Go late afternoon and stay through sunset if the museum’s hours allow it; watching the city light up from that height is worth timing around.
For lunch, find a standing sushi counter rather than a sit-down restaurant. These no-frills spots, ordering at a bar with barely any seating, consistently serve better fish for less money than restaurants trading on ambiance.
Roppongi’s nightlife has a reputation that swings between genuinely good live jazz and clubs, and touts working the street corners aggressively for bars charging outrageous cover once you’re inside. Politely ignore anyone who approaches you on the sidewalk with a flyer or a personal invitation; walk into places you found yourself.
Day 6: Ueno and Skytree
Ueno Park in the morning holds an unusual density of museums for one green space, the Tokyo National Museum chief among them for a serious survey of Japanese art and history across centuries. The National Museum of Western Art next door is a smaller but worthwhile detour if European painting interests you.
Lunch at a traditional yakitori spot near the park does grilled skewers the way most of Tokyo’s cheap izakayas do them well: fast, smoky, and better than the price suggests.
Ride out to Tokyo Skytree in the afternoon. At over 630 meters it’s the tallest structure in Japan, and the observation deck gives a wider, flatter view of the city than Roppongi Hills does, useful if you want to actually spot Mount Fuji on a clear winter day. Dinner at the base of the tower, in one of the many restaurants in the surrounding Solamachi complex, closes out the day without needing to travel far.
Day 7: Departure
Keep breakfast simple and use any remaining hour for last-minute shopping near your hotel rather than fighting crowds somewhere new. For the airport transfer, the Narita Express runs directly from major stations to Narita in under an hour, while the Skyliner is faster and often cheaper if you’re departing from Ueno or Nippori. For Haneda, the monorail from Hamamatsucho or the Keikyu Line from Shinagawa both get you there in under 30 minutes; Haneda is closer to central Tokyo than Narita by a wide margin, so double-check which airport your flight actually departs from well before your last day.
Getting around
The JR Yamanote Line loops through all the major hub stations and the Tokyo Metro fills in everything else; a rechargeable IC card like Suica or Pasmo works across both systems and on buses, and increasingly you can add one directly to a phone wallet before you even land, which saves the ticket machine line on day one. Trains stop running shortly after midnight, so plan your last ride home before then or budget for a taxi, which gets expensive fast over any real distance.