Tokyo Editor Picks

Just a three minutes’ walk to Tokyo Station (for easy arrival and quick getaways) is this 57-room den of noble, striated wood and stonework. The intimate scale, low-rise profile, and triple-pane, floor-to-ceiling windows allow you to appreciate the street life (or train life) before sinking back in your leather-canopy-topped bed on one of five types of pillows. Marble bathrooms feature slate flooring and hideaway, three-way mirrors. Be sure to visit the spa, where the ingredients in the treatments – white lotus, ginger flower, rice – sound as delicious as they feel. The Ekki restaurant and bar is an explosion of green velour with orange and yellow accents.

Traditional Japanese inns are hard to come by in Tokyo, but this one in the Asakusa old town district has rooms with tatami (rice mat flooring), futon bedding spread on the floor and an ofuro (Japanese style bath) with views over rooftops to Sensoji Temple. Western-style rooms are also available.

Perched atop an office building (the lobby’s on the 24th floor and the rooms go up from there), the Royal Park offers low-key luxury – white linens, internet built into the TV, and fogless bathroom mirrors – at a very decent price. Many rooms have views across Hama Rikyu Gardens and Tokyo Bay.

Three mostly new must-see museums are within easy walking distance of each other: The Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills has edgy, contemporary works, the National Art Center Tokyo offers classics like Monet, and the Suntory Museum of Art typically exhibits traditional Japanese art.

Centerpiece of Tokyo’s most storied old town district. The busy, blocks-long Nakamise-dori pedestrian street is lined with souvenir and snack stalls on the way to the Chinese-roofed Buddhist temple and nearby pagoda.

Get an overview of Japanese art history in a matter of a couple hours. You’ve certainly been to larger museums with more items on display, but each work of art here – ceramics to statuary to woodblock prints – is a masterpiece. Afterwards, stroll Ueno Park with its other museums and shrines.

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The name comes from a long Japanese tradition of tachinomiya (literally “standing-while-drinking house”), and this one offers a traditional Japanese aesthetic of lanterns and exposed beams, plus cheap drinks (try the shochu, Japanese vodka).