Nakameguro's canal runs for about two kilometres between low riverbanks lined with restaurants, cafes, and boutiques, and in cherry blossom season it is the most photographed stretch of water in Japan. Outside of that two-week window it is still a genuinely good street to walk: the restaurants are serious, the coffee is excellent, the pace is slow enough to notice what is there.
Daikanyama, immediately to the west, is the neighbourhood that the architects of the Omotesando flagships live in when they are not working. It is residential in character but punctuated with design objects: Tsutaya Books, a bookshop built by Klein Dytham Architecture that covers design, art, photography, and literature in a building that understands how to sell books, is the best bookshop for visual material in the city and possibly in Asia. The Hollywood Ranch Market and the independent fashion boutiques around it represent the Tokyo that has been influential in international fashion for thirty years without most of the fashion world knowing why.
Together the two neighbourhoods form a low-intensity day that rewards a slow walk, a long breakfast, and an afternoon in a bookshop.
Design and architecture people who want to understand the residential and commercial side of Tokyo's aesthetic culture, not just the landmark buildings. Food and coffee people who want to eat and drink at the level the neighbourhood operates at. Visitors on a longer trip who want an afternoon that does not involve a famous temple or a department store. People who want to be in a part of the city where the pace is human.
Not the right area for first-time visitors with limited days. Nakameguro and Daikanyama do not have specific sites to visit; they are neighbourhoods to inhabit for an afternoon, and their pleasures are ambient rather than discrete.
Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama: two floors of books on architecture, design, photography, art, and literature, a record section, a cafe, and a stationary supply that is better than most specialist stationary shops. The canal walk, which starts at Nakameguro station and runs east and west: best at seven in the morning or at seven in the evening when the restaurants have their lights on. The vintage shops on the lanes behind the canal: the density of interesting second-hand fashion in this neighbourhood is second only to Shimokitazawa. Log Road, the elevated former rail track converted to a garden walk between Nakameguro and Daikanyama. Onigiri Asakusa Yadoroku at the canal-side location for a meal that costs almost nothing and is very good.