Marunouchi & Tokyo Station丸の内・東京駅

Guide · Anywhere in the centre

A rainy day in Tokyo, done well: a national collection, a depachika lunch, a coffee house, an art-book lounge and a bath

Tokyo in the rain is not a lesser city; it is one that moves indoors, into museums, food halls, coffee houses and baths that were built for exactly this. The rule is to choose one district and stay under its roofs — every large station is a covered city — rather than to cross town. Here is a day assembled from the best of them, with the alternatives by area so you can build your own.

Ueno & Yanaka · Shinjuku · Marunouchi & Tokyo Station · Nakameguro, Daikanyama & Ebisu · Roppongi & Azabu · 5 stops

One day · Marunouchi, Imperial Palace, Nihonbashi

Edo under the towers: the palace gardens, the red-brick station, and the shops that have sold one thing for three hundred years

Tokyo was Edo, and Edo was a castle; this is the day that shows you where it stood and what grew around it. A morning inside the castle walls, in a garden that costs nothing; lunch on the avenue the city's businesspeople walk; an afternoon at the bridge every road was measured from and in the shops that have sold knives, paper and dashi since the shogunate. It is the most orderly day in the city, and the one that makes the rest of Tokyo make sense.

Marunouchi & Tokyo Station · Nihonbashi · 8 stops

Tokyo Station Marunouchi Building東京駅丸の内駅舎

The 1914 red-brick station, its domes restored, with a gallery, a hotel and a city of food underneath.

45 min · Tokyo (JR / Shinkansen / Marunouchi line)

Imperial Palace East Gardens皇居東御苑

The site of Edo Castle — the great keep's stone base, the moats, and a garden open free to anyone who walks in.

90 min · Otemachi (five subway lines), exit C13a, straight to the Otemon gate

Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum三菱一号館美術館

Marunouchi's first office building of 1894, rebuilt brick by brick as a museum of nineteenth-century art.

75 min · Tokyo (Marunouchi south exit) or Nijubashimae (Chiyoda line)

Marunouchi Naka-dori丸の内仲通り

The plane-tree avenue that Tokyo's businesspeople walk at lunchtime — sculpture, shopfronts and the calmest pavements in the city.

40 min · Tokyo or Otemachi, any exit on the palace side

KITTE and the rooftop gardenKITTEと屋上庭園

The old central post office turned shopping atrium, with a free rooftop facing the station façade.

60 min · Tokyo (Marunouchi south exit), directly across the plaza

Idemitsu Museum of Arts出光美術館

Ceramics, ink painting and the poet-monk Sengai, on the ninth floor overlooking the palace moat.

60 min · Hibiya (Hibiya / Chiyoda / Mita lines) or Yurakucho (JR)