Most travellers experience Tokyo Station as a problem to be solved: find the right concourse, find the right platform, get on the Shinkansen. It is a genuinely confusing building, and that reputation is earned.
It is also one of the more rewarding buildings in central Tokyo, and the fix for both facts is the same — arrive an hour earlier than you need to.
Tokyo Station Gallery
An art gallery inside the red brick station building, with exhibitions that lean toward Japanese artists and the history of the city. Small enough to see properly in an hour.
The detail people miss: the gallery's stairwells expose the original brickwork of the 1914 structure. The building was badly damaged in 1945 and only restored to its original form in 2012, so what you're standing in is both a century old and quite recent.
Ramen Street
Eight ramen shops in a basement corridor, each a branch of an established Tokyo name and each doing a different regional style. It sounds like a food court and isn't — these are serious operators.
Our advice: Rokurinsha's tsukemen is the famous one and the queue reflects it. Go before eleven or after two, or pick one of the other seven, which are also very good and which you will walk straight into. A twenty-minute wait for noodles before a train you cannot miss is a bad trade.
Character Street
A corridor of small shops given over to Japanese characters and studios — Pokémon, Ghibli, Hello Kitty, the NHK mascots, and a dozen you won't recognise.
Worth knowing: this is the single best place in Tokyo to solve presents for children, precisely because it's compact. What would take an afternoon in Harajuku takes twenty minutes here.
The Marunouchi facade
Leave by the Marunouchi side and turn around. The 1914 red brick building, with its domes and Renaissance detailing, sits in deliberate contrast to the glass towers behind you — and the plaza in front was reworked to give you room to look at it.
Our advice: it is best at dusk, when the brick is lit and still has daylight behind it. There is also a free public viewing terrace on an upper floor of the KITTE building across the road, which gives you the roofline from above. Most visitors photograph it from the plaza and never learn the terrace exists.
The Imperial Palace East Gardens
Ten minutes' walk from the Marunouchi exit. The East Gardens are open to the public without a booking, and hold the stone foundations of Edo Castle's keep — which is as close as Tokyo comes to showing you what it was before it was Tokyo.
Check before you go: the gardens close on Mondays and Fridays, and on occasional days for imperial events. The palace grounds proper are a separate, ticketed tour and not the same thing.
One more thing, if you're catching a train
Buy your ekiben — the station bento — rather than eating first. Tokyo Station's selection is the best in the country, sorted by region, and eating a bento made for the place you're travelling to while you travel there is one of the small pleasures of Japanese rail travel. The Daimaru food hall attached to the station is the other option, and is excellent.
Tokyo Station rewards the hour you didn't think you had. Build it in deliberately rather than discovering it in a rush.
If your trip involves Shinkansen legs between cities, your Elite Tokyo Tours tour manager can handle the seat reservations and the luggage forwarding so that the hour before your train is yours rather than spent at a ticket machine.
