Tokyo Map: Every Place This Guide Covers, On One Screen

The JR Yamanote Line runs a loop around the middle of the city, and the districts a first trip cares about sit either on that loop or one short ride inside it. Shinjuku, Harajuku and Shibuya are strung along its western arc, close enough together that people walk between them without meaning to. Tokyo Station, Ueno and Akihabara sit on the eastern arc.

The Imperial Palace grounds fill the space in the middle, which is the reason no line runs straight across the centre and the reason a cross-city journey usually goes around the ring or under it on a subway.

Seven stations on or beside that loop, with the guide each one opens. The coordinates are the ones our own pages publish, and the notes are what those pages state about each interchange rather than a general impression.

Three of the areas pinned on this map are deliberately not on the loop, and that is the most useful single fact about them. Asakusa sits east of the ring, off it on the Ginza Line, which is a large part of why the temple quarter feels like a different city rather than another district of the same one. Odaiba sits out in the bay and is reached only by the Yurikamome or the Rinkai Line, so it is a decision for a half day rather than a detour on the way somewhere. Ginza sits inside the ring, three Metro lines deep, close enough to Tokyo Station to be walked to and far enough from the JR platforms that visitors keep sailing past it.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. If a day's pins all sit on the western arc, that day needs almost no planning. If a day mixes the western arc with anything east of the river, it needs a decision about which order to do things in, because the crossing is the expensive part. The area guides go district by district, and the transport page covers which operator's ticket actually pays for the crossing.

The western arc is where the towers and the shopping are, and where the night is. Shinjuku holds the free observatories at the top of the Metropolitan Government Building, the drinking lanes of Golden Gai and Omoide Yokocho, and the busiest station on the map. Shibuya holds the crossing and the rooftop deck that looks down on it.

Harajuku sits between them, with Takeshita Street on one side of the railway and the deep forest of Meiji Jingu on the other, which is the fastest change of scene anywhere in the city. Yoyogi Park adjoins the shrine and is open at all hours. Almost everything in this paragraph is a pin in the first two colours on the map, and all of it is within one arc of one line.

East is the older city, and the Sumida River is the line to think in. Asakusa sits on its west bank around Senso-ji, with the shrine beside the temple, the kitchen-supply street of Kappabashi ten minutes away and the drinking alley off the old theatre block. Cross the river and the Skytree is about 1.3 kilometres away on foot.

North of Asakusa the loop's eastern arc picks up Ueno, where the park stacks four museums, a zoo and a shrine inside a free public garden, and Akihabara a couple of stops south. Ryogoku, with the sumo arena and the sumo museum inside it, sits east of the river as well, and Tomioka Hachimangu, where professional sumo began, is further downstream again. The eastern half of this map is where the free pins cluster, because temples and shrines here do not charge and public parks do not either.

The bay is the third city and the newest one. Toyosu holds the wholesale fish market with its visitor passages and its attached food street, and teamLab Planets one stop away on the Yurikamome. Odaiba is further west along the waterfront, reached by the same elevated line or by the Rinkai Line, with a seaside park, a free pedestrian deck across the Rainbow Bridge and the view back at the skyline that every other pin sits inside. Beyond the bay's eastern edge, over the boundary in Chiba, sit the two Disney parks and Maihama Station. None of that reclaimed land existed as a destination fifty years ago, which is why the digital-art venues and the newest market are all out here rather than in the centre.

West of the loop the city thins but does not stop. The Ghibli Museum stands on the corner of a park in Mitaka, and Gotoku-ji, the beckoning-cat temple, sits in a residential district further south west. Both are genuine outliers on this map and both are reachable in well under an hour, which is the reason they are pinned rather than filed with the out-of-town trips on the day trips hub.

Ten walks between pins on this map, with the time the relevant page on this site states for each. Each figure comes from the venue's own directions or from the distance the page records, and each row names the page it came from.

Three patterns fall out of that list. The first is that the western arc is genuinely walkable end to end: Harajuku to Shibuya, Shibuya to the shrine, the shrine back to Harajuku, all of it about twenty minutes a leg, which means a full afternoon there can be planned with no train at all. The second is that the Asakusa and Skytree pair is the walk people most often skip and most often regret skipping, because the river path is the view. The third is that the walk nobody plans for is the one inside the station. Shinjuku is the busiest station on this map, and ten of the twenty-five minutes between the Metropolitan Government Building and Shinjuku Gyoen are spent getting out of the concourse.

The practical rule this produces: budget ten minutes to leave any large station, and treat any pin more than about a kilometre from your last one as a train ride rather than a walk unless the walk itself is the point. The exception is the river, where the walk is always the point.

Tokyo Metro sets out the system on its own subway-map page, read in Q3 2026: a station code is a letter standing for the line plus a number standing for the station, printed inside a circle in that line's own colour. The operator lists three reasons to use it, and all three are the reasons a visitor needs. You can identify the station on the line you want rather than guessing between similarly named ones. You can count the stops to your transfer, because the numbers run in order. And you can confirm you are on a train going the right way, because the numbers should be rising or falling in the direction you expect. Metro names nine lines on that page: Ginza, Marunouchi, Hibiya, Tozai, Chiyoda, Yurakucho, Fukutoshin, Hanzomon and Namboku.

Those nine are not the whole subway. Toei, the network run by the metropolitan government rather than by Tokyo Metro, adds four more lines that its own service-status board lists as Asakusa, Mita, Shinjuku and Oedo, plus the Toden streetcar and the Nippori-Toneri Liner. Two operators, thirteen subway lines, one numbering grammar, and separate fares. The transport page is where the fare arithmetic and the transfer discount between them live.

The second half of the system is the exit. Large Tokyo stations have exits lettered and numbered rather than named by compass point, and the difference between two of them can be a ten-minute walk around a block you cannot cross. That is why the pages on this site name exits rather than stations wherever the venue publishes one: the observatory lobby is a minute from Tochomae exit A4, the temple is five minutes from Asakusa's Toei exit A4, Tokyo Tower is five minutes from the Akabanebashi gate at Akabanebashi Station, teamLab Borderless is two minutes from Kamiyacho exit 5, teamLab Planets is a minute from the north exit at Shin-Toyosu, and the palace gardens' main gate is five minutes from Otemachi exit C13a.

Write the exit down with the address. A pin will get you to the right block; only the exit letter gets you out of the right side of the station, and on a wet evening at Shinjuku that is the difference between a five-minute walk and a twenty-minute one.

Take a real one from a body that publishes its own: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government prints its address at the foot of its website as 2-8-1 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, postcode 163-8001. Read it inward. Shinjuku-ku is the ward, one of the twenty-three that make up the central city. Nishi-Shinjuku is the district inside that ward. The 2 is the chome, a numbered sub-district. The 8 is the block within that chome. The 1 is the building on that block. There is no street in the address at all, because the block, not the street, is the unit that gets numbered. That address belongs to the building whose free observatories are pin 4 on the map above.

Once you can read that, every other address on this site decodes the same way. Toyosu Market is 6-6-1 Toyosu, teamLab Planets is 6-1-16 Toyosu on the same reclaimed grid, the sumo arena is 1-3-28 Yokoami, the kabuki theatre is 4-12-15 Ginza, and the Ghibli Museum is 1-1-83 Shimorenjaku out in Mitaka. Ueno Park breaks the pattern with just 5-20 Uenokoen, no chome at all, because a park is not divided into blocks the way a residential district is.

Two further things surprise people. The first is that block numbers are not always sequential in walking order, so counting up a lane can walk you away from a building rather than towards it. The second is that a great deal of Tokyo is upstairs, and the floor is part of the address rather than an afterthought. The MICHELIN Guide's own listings for the restaurants named on the food guide put the floor first for exactly that reason: one is on the fourth floor of a named building in Ginza, another on the first floor above street level in Shinjuku. A shop at street level with no sign visible from the pavement is entirely normal, and the building name does more work than the number.

So the working method is this. Use the pin on the map above, or the Google Maps link inside it, to get to the block. Use the building name and the floor to get to the door. Use the exit letter to get out of the station on the correct side. If you are checking that you have the right district at all, Japan Post's postcode search, read in Q3 2026, will take a seven-digit code and give back the district it belongs to, or take a district and give back the code. And if none of that resolves it, the postcode and the building name written on a piece of paper are more use to a passer-by than the romanised address, which almost nobody reads locally.

Four map options a visitor can hold at once, compared on the one thing that matters on the ground: what survives without a signal. The offline behaviour of Google Maps is quoted from Google's own help page for downloaded areas, and the two PDFs are the free official downloads from the city's tourism body and from Tokyo Metro, all read in Q3 2026.

The gap in that table is the one to plan around. Google's offline mode is the option most visitors assume covers them, and it is the one that quietly removes walking directions, which is the only mode most people use in Tokyo. That is a good reason not to rely on a single map: download the area anyway, but also save the railway PDF, and screenshot the pin and the exit letter for anywhere you have booked a timed ticket, because a timed slot missed for a navigation failure is not refunded.

Connectivity itself is a solved problem here if you set it up before you land. The metropolitan government runs a free public wifi service and states in its own terms of use that no fee is charged for it, and the alternatives, from an eSIM bought before departure to a rented pocket router, are compared on the staying connected page. What none of them fixes is a phone with no battery, and every walking route on this page assumes a working screen.