Marunouchi 丸の内

Marunouchi means “inside the moat”, and the district still behaves like the castle’s front yard. Tokyo Station’s red-brick facade, restored to its 1914 domes in 2012, faces a straight avenue of plane trees that leads to the Imperial Palace, and the East Gardens on the former inner citadel are open to anyone for free: a stone keep base, a 17th-century guardhouse and an iris garden, with office workers eating bento under the pines. Around them, the Mitsubishi group’s headquarters towers have been rebuilt with ground-floor shopping streets, and the Naka-dori boulevard has become the city’s most pleasant place for a slow walk between a Louis Vuitton and a Pierre Hermé.

Ten minutes east, Nihonbashi is where Edo did business. The stone bridge of 1911 still carries the bronze marker from which all distances to Tokyo are measured, buried under an expressway that is finally being removed. The Mitsukoshi flagship with its lion statues and pipe organ, the dried-bonito and knife shops near the Coredo buildings and the Kite Museum keep a merchant tradition alive. Marunouchi is where you arrive in Tokyo; it is worth staying for an afternoon before leaving the station behind.