Tokyo After Dark with a Photographer: Shibuya Sky at Golden Hour, then Shinjuku's Neon

Tokyo at night is two entirely different cities and this evening covers both, deliberately in the right order. It also solves the problem every traveller has here: you come home with photographs of the city and none of yourself in it, because there was nobody to take them.

The first half is height. Shibuya Sky is an open-air deck 230 metres up, and the timed-entry ticket is included, which matters because slots sell out days ahead in peak season. You arrive for golden hour and stay through the switch — the sun going down behind the skyline, then the grid lighting up beneath you, with Mount Fuji visible on clear winter evenings. The guide knows where on the deck to stand as the light turns from gold to blue, and shoots you while you watch.

The second half is street level, and the contrast is the point. A short hop to Shinjuku puts you in Kabukicho, where the neon is dense enough to read by, past the Godzilla head above the Toho building, and into Omoide Yokocho — a surviving cluster of alleys barely wide enough for two people, lined with tiny grill bars and thick with yakitori smoke. It is the older Tokyo that the towers replaced everywhere else, and it photographs better than anywhere in the city.

The guide is a local who works the same route often enough to know which corners hold their light and which are blocked by delivery trucks at nine o'clock. Group size caps at fifteen. Food, drinks and transport between districts are not included, so bring a transit card and some cash if you want to stop for a skewer — and most people do.