A day in Tokyo, and the walking nobody counts
Let us start by conceding the obvious. Tokyo has one of the best metro systems in the world. It is clean, it is punctual, it is cheap, and it will take you within a few hundred metres of almost anywhere you want to go.
So the question is a fair one. Why would anyone book a private vehicle and a guide in a city that already solves the problem of getting about?
The answer is not that the trains are bad. It is that the train journey is only a part of the day, and it is not the part that tires people out.
The bit of the journey nobody counts
When guests plan a Tokyo day, they look at the map, see fifteen minutes between two stations, and budget fifteen minutes. What that number leaves out is most of what actually happens.
The walk from your hotel to the station.
Finding the right line, in a station that may have several, on several levels.
The change halfway, which means another platform, often up and down stairs.
The walk from the exit to the place you are genuinely going, which is rarely at the exit.
And all of it again, in reverse, to get to the next thing on your list.
Do that five or six times in a day, which is what a full Tokyo itinerary requires, and the walking and the changing quietly become the day. The travelling between places was never the expensive part.
Thirty thousand steps, or twelve thousand
Here is the clearest way we can put it, and the numbers are ours, from doing this repeatedly.
Take a full Tokyo day with eight places on the list. Doing that on foot and by train is not realistic in the time available, and if you attempt it you will walk more than thirty thousand steps.
The same eight places, with a vehicle and a guide, fit into a ten hour day, and you will walk somewhere around ten to twelve thousand steps.
You are still walking. You are still out in the city all day. You are simply not spending a third of it on the pavement between a station exit and the thing you came to see.
One example makes it concrete. Meiji Shrine sits one to two kilometres from the station. Every guest who arrives by train walks that, twice, before and after seeing anything. Arriving with us, the walk is about three hundred metres.
Multiply that difference by eight stops and you have the entire argument, in your legs rather than on paper.
Which means the real question is who is travelling
This is worth being straightforward about, because it is not the same answer for everybody.
If you are travelling alone or with friends, you are comfortable on your feet, you have no fixed schedule and nobody is waiting on you, then Tokyo is an easy city to work out for yourself. Plenty of people do exactly that and have a wonderful time.
The picture changes completely when the group changes. Children who need the toilet at inconvenient moments. Parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, for whom a day of stairs and platforms is not a small thing. A group that has one day in Tokyo and a list of places it would like to actually see rather than approximately reach.
For those guests the calculation is not about speed at all. It is about how much of the day is spent on the thing you came for.
What we do instead
It is simple enough, and the whole value is in the two ends of each journey rather than the middle.
We take you straight to the attraction. Not to the station nearest it. To it, with as little walking as the road allows.
Your guide is with you while you are there, so nobody is navigating, queueing for tickets or working out which gate to use.
We collect you from the nearest possible pickup point when you are done, which is again a shorter walk than any station exit would have been.
Everything stays in the vehicle. Coats, umbrellas, shopping, the pushchair.
And the car is yours for the day, so the plan can change at eleven in the morning without anybody having to reprice a ticket.
None of that makes the metro worse than it is. It is a superb system and we use it ourselves. It simply is not built around a family of six with a grandmother and one day in Tokyo, and that is who we are built around.
The order of the day, and why it starts at a fish market
Here is the route we usually run, and the order is not arbitrary. Every position on this list is there for a reason.
1. Tsukiji Fish Market. First, always, because the shops start closing around one in the afternoon. Arrive here at two and you have arrived at a street of shutters. This one decision shapes everything after it.
2. The East Gardens of the Imperial Palace.
3. Akihabara.
4. Sensoji Temple.
5. Tokyo Skytree.
6. Meiji Jingu Shrine.
7. Takeshita Street, the fashion street of Japan.
8. Shibuya Crossing.
Then back to your hotel, or anywhere else you would rather be dropped. If you want dinner somewhere across the city, that is where the day ends.
Eight places, and the sequence runs east to west across Tokyo so that nothing is doubled back on. That is the sort of thing that is obvious once someone has done it a few hundred times and invisible when you are planning from a hotel room.
Where the driver goes while you are walking around
Guests ask this, and the answer is undramatic, which is rather the point.
Wherever possible the driver simply waits at the same place he set you down, so the vehicle is there when you come back. Central Tokyo does not always allow that, and where it does not, he moves to the nearest parking area and waits there instead.
Then, on the way back, your guide calls the driver. By the time you and the guide reach the pickup point, the vehicle is already there. You do not stand on a pavement waiting for a car, and you do not walk to find one.
That small piece of coordination is most of what you are paying for, and it is the part that cannot be replicated by hiring a car and driving yourself.
And it means you never walk back on yourself
This is the benefit guests never anticipate and always notice.
Take Takeshita Street. It is a long, narrow shopping street, and you enter at one end and come out at the other. On your own, coming out at the far end means turning round and walking the whole thing again to get back to where you started, through the same crowd you have just squeezed through.
With us you simply carry on walking. The driver drops you at one end and is waiting at the other when you emerge.
That happens all day, at every stop, and it adds up to a great deal more than it sounds. No backtracking, less walking, and the hours you save go into the things you actually came for: looking at things properly, shopping, and eating.
Where you eat
Lunch is entirely your decision, both what you eat and where. We have no arrangement with anybody and we are not steering you into a restaurant that has an arrangement with us.
What we usually suggest is eating at the Skytree stop, and the reason is choice rather than any particular dish.
The fourth floor, at the Skytree entrance, has a food court, and there is nearly always a food exhibition running.
The sixth and seventh floors of Tokyo Solamachi hold restaurants of every kind. Sushi, teppanyaki, paella, Chinese, Indian, French, a buffet, and a Starbucks for anyone who has had enough adventure for one morning.
That concentration solves a problem most groups have and few anticipate. On a family day out, one person wants sushi, one wants noodles, a child wants something recognisable and somebody has a dietary requirement. In one building, everybody eats what they want and nobody spends forty minutes walking between restaurants trying to find the compromise.
If you would rather eat earlier, Sensoji has plenty of restaurants and local food stalls around it, and that works just as well.
What will not fit, and why
Guests send us their list before booking, and occasionally something on it cannot be done. The most common one is Kamakura.
It is a reasonable request on the face of it. Kamakura is only 40 to 45 kilometres from central Tokyo, which sounds like an hour of driving and an easy addition to a city day.
It is not, and this is the thing to understand about driving anywhere near Tokyo. Kilometres do not predict minutes. Those 40 kilometres take at least 90 minutes, because of the traffic, the sheer number of sets of lights, and the narrow roads at the far end.
And that is only the getting there. You have not yet seen the Great Buddha, walked a temple garden or been anywhere near the coast.
So adding Kamakura to a Tokyo day means three hours in the vehicle and a rushed hour at the other end, in exchange for losing half of Tokyo. We will say so when you ask, because the alternative is a day that disappoints twice.
Kamakura is a day of its own, and we run it as its own private tour. If you have the days available, take it properly.
What to tell us
To put a day together for you, this is all we need:
Four adults and two children, staying in Shinjuku, one full day on the 14th, my parents are in their seventies, we would like Sensoji and Shibuya and my daughter wants Akihabara.
That is enough for us to build a route, put the right vehicle on it and tell you honestly what will and will not fit. Send it on WhatsApp and you will have a plan and a price back quickly, with no obligation.
The short version
Tokyo's metro is excellent. The cost of using it is not the train, it is the walking and the changing at either end of every journey.
Eight places on foot and by train is more than thirty thousand steps and does not fit in a day. The same eight with a vehicle is ten to twelve thousand steps in ten hours.
Meiji Jingu is one to two kilometres from the station. With us it is a three hundred metre walk.
Tsukiji is always first, because the shops start closing at one.
The driver waits where he dropped you, or nearby, and your guide calls him on the way back. No waiting on pavements, and no walking back on yourself.
Kamakura will not fit into a Tokyo day. Forty kilometres is ninety minutes each way, and it deserves its own.
If you are travelling with children or with older parents, this is what the day is designed around.
Our private day tours begin at your hotel door within Tokyo's 23 wards. If you are arriving or leaving on the same trip, our airport and cruise transfers use the same vehicles, so it is worth mentioning both at once.
