No sooner had I arrived at Narita Airport than I found myself on a train with a gaggle of giggling schoolgirls. It was late afternoon, and to save a few yen (my JR pass wasn't good until the next day), I'd caught a commuter train. If you should ever find yourself in Tokyo, do this. You may be jetlagged and just want to get to your hotel, but it only takes another half-hour, and you'll get a more leisurely look at the Tokyo suburbs and what's left of the Kanto Plain (think tidy new towns and rice paddies with tufts -- little wooded hills -- rising out of them at random). More importantly, you'll get a faster introduction to Japanese people: schoolgirls, grandmothers and commuters, all having an ordinary day, oblivious to the excitable gaijin in their midst.

This is not the prettiest map I've ever made, nor the most accurate. But it is a mental map of my explorations of Tokyo, in the style of Japanese rail maps: strictly diagrammatic, conveying only as much information as is absolutely necessary in order to be understood. To actually get around, I relied on a printout of this map, as well as my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook, which is already tattered just a few weeks after I bought it. We'll be starting in the top-right (northeast) corner.

Asakusa district. This is the first photo I took in Japan. My airport train had taken me as far as Ueno Station, where I walked outside just to stand on the terra firma of Tokyo before changing trains for Minowa. I walked to my hotel, checked in, dropped my duffel bag in my room and headed out on foot for Asakusa Temple, a mile or so away. The above photo is of a fairly typical Tokyo street, although most are more like alleys, with no sidewalk and only a painted stripe to separate autos from pedestrians. Not that it really matters: There are more pedestrians and cyclists than cars, so in effect, everyone shares the entire street. By the way, note the hazy sunset. Air pollution is a major problem in Japan, although unlike in the U.S., it's caused largely by industry and not cars.

Asakusa. The next day (see below), I would come across another café named "Colorado." The ancestral homeland is big in Japan? Could it be internationally famous, enjoying a global reputation? Must be the skiing.

Senso-ji, Asakusa. Asakusa is Tokyo's old shitamachi -- downtown -- but the center of gravity has long since shifted southwest, leaving the heart of old Edo a bit of a tourist trap. Still, since I arrived in Tokyo at about 2 a.m. California time, and it was walking distance from my hotel, it made for a fine introduction to the city. At the temple you can purchase a fortune from Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Mine said something to the effect of, "you work too hard." I left it for the cute girl at the front desk of the hotel.

The next morning I awoke ready to go ... at 4 a.m., or noon California time. This would be a good time to describe my hotel, as I spent the next couple of hours in my room, trying and failing to go back to sleep. The New Koyo bills itself as the "cheapest hotel in Tokyo," and at 2,500 yen for a private room -- about $22.50 -- it probably is. It's a youth hostel, with all that suggests. Yet it was clean, with friendly, English-speaking staff and guests from all over the world. There was a TV in my room (Japanese broadcast television appears to consist largely of cooking and game shows, although I watched what my friend Aaron later told me was a whole channel for railfans; I saw a video of German streetcars). Of course, that room looked suspiciously like a jail cell, and it was so tiny I had to lay my futon at an angle. And the neighborhood is somewhat off the beaten path, and reputed to be the "worst" in Tokyo; there were working-class riots nearby in the '80s, though as one online reviewer put it: (L)et's be honest, what they called a "riot" in Tokyo might be called, say, "Carnival" in Rio or "Thursday" in L.A. Again: Not only is there no crime in Tokyo, there's not even a sense of risk. Old men loitered around my hotel; a few even lived there, left over from the days when it was a flophouse -- you'd see them shaving in the morning. But they were utterly harmless. One approached me to ask, in English, if I spoke Japanese. No, I said. That's OK, he said, I don't speak English. Your English is a lot better than my Japanese, I told him. He laughed and walked away. And so long as we're discussing conversations with Japanese people, here's one I had in the backpacker bar around the corner: Where are you from, I was asked. San Francisco, I replied. "Ah, Sanu-furanceesco!" the guy said. "Giants! Bondsu! Kanpai!

Meiji-jingu and DoCoMo Yoyogi Building. Finally, around 6 a.m., I set out for rush-hour train rides on the Toden Arakawa and Yamanote lines (see the Railfanning section for those, as well as the Shinjuku and Ikebukuro stations so central to the everyday lives of Tokyo residents). Eventually I arrived at Harajuku, the youth fashion district now known the world over as the subject of a Gwen Stefani song. But my first stop was across the tracks at a very different sort of place, the Meiji Shrine. In the Meiji Restoration of 1868 power was restored, after nearly three centuries, from the Shogunate to the Emperor -- though not without a fight, as anyone who's seen The Last Samurai can tell you (it's an awful movie, in part because Ken Watanabe should be a leading man, and not Tom Cruise; but for anyone who cares, the climactic battle actually took place in Ueno Park, near my hotel). Anyway, the shrine is in the heart of modern Tokyo; in the background is the city's tallest building to the tip of its spire, at 892 feet (the TMG No. 1 building, pictured on the next page, is taller to the roof at 797 feet). The DoCoMo Building, interestingly, has no occupants; it houses mobile phone equipment. Like the Tokyo Tower pictured elsewhere, it is a blatant ripoff of a famous foreign structure, in this case the Empire State Building. That's just the Japanese way.

Meiji-jingu. Those are monks in the background. In the foreground, women preparing the stage for a martial arts display. Yes, I enjoyed my stay in Japan.

Takeshita-dori, Harajuku. Here is where the "Harajuku girls" hang out; here, and on Sundays, in a plaza by Yoyogi-koen, the park including Meiji Shrine. Unfortunately I wasn't there on a Sunday, when the youth of Tokyo (and the Tokyo suburbs) gather for a "costume play" parade of outlandish outfits, a fun-filled freak scene. Anyway, I wandered down the street to Omotesando, the slighly more adult (re: upscale) shopping zone before taking the subway to ...

Shibuya Station. My thoughts exactly! Shibuya Crossing, across the plaza from the station, can be found in the Wallpaper and Video sections. Shibuya is a retail and nightlife district like so many in Tokyo, but it also includes Love Hotel Hill, seen below. Incidentally, I saw that same "L" shape the girls are making with their hands on several ads, so I asked my friend Aaron's Japanese girlfriend, Nami, what it meant. "Nothing," she said. "They just think it looks cool." And here I was thinking it was the Japanese equivalent of throwing signs.

Love Hotel Hill, Shibuya. This is just one of dozens of themed love hotels in the city's foremost cluster -- though they can be found all over. One was San Francisco-themed -- although with a name like "Alcatraz," one has to wonder how much it's really about the city, and how much it has to do with, say, bondage. "Rest," by the way, is my new favorite euphemism for sex. And no, I didn't stay in any (nor in a capsule hotel).

Roppongi Hills and Tokyo Tower. Roppongi Hills is a massive mixed-use development in the eponymous district by developer Minoru Mori, who to promote it created the legendary (among city geeks, anyway) Mid-Tokyo Maps series of Flash-based, interactive maps of Tokyo way back in 2001 (click on "Archives" at bottom). In the distance is the tallest structure in Tokyo, the 1,092-foot Eiffel Tower imitator, Tokyo Tower (Note: a 2,000-foot TV tower is planned in Asakusa).

Shinjuku West. Finally, around twilight, we find our way back to neon central -- the "new downtown" of Shinjuku. I said before that Japanese cities can be sort of ... well, nondescript by day. But by night, they light up -- literally and figuratively. And no place in Japan shines brighter than Shinjuku. When Americans think of neon, they think of Las Vegas, or Times Square; Shinjuku combines the eye-poppingly electric, urban feel of the latter with the mind-blowing scale of the former. In Shinjuku West, the office towers of Nishi-Shinjuku (here, TMG No. 1) make for an interesting contrast. In the Wallpaper section, you can find an image from just around the corner.

Shinjuku West. It must be the skiing. (Incidentally, bonus points if you can spot the Engrish. It's easy to make fun of Japanese butcherings of the language, but Japanese people were infinitely patient with my mispronunciations of the half-dozen words I sort of knew in theirs.)

Yamanote Line and Nishi-Shinjuku. We're now crossing over to the east side of the station.

Shinjuku East, in an alleyway more or less hidden behind the station. Early evening rain had made Shinjuku just that much more dazzling after dark.

Shinjuku East.

Kabukicho, Shinjuku East. Kabukicho is Tokyo's top red-light district, with a concentration of love hotels almost as great as Shibuya's. Not pictured: some of the racier advertising on public display.

Shinjuku East.

Shinjuku East.

Shinjuku East. I heard this area, a square by the station's east exit, referred to as "Shinjuku Times Square." Times Square should be called "Midtown Shinjuku." By the way, a Japanese kid came up to me here. We tried to talk for about a minute, but his English was almost worse than my Japanese. What I did get from him: "I ... play ... bass" (he said as he mimicked the motion ... certainly helping me to understand).

Anti-smoking sign, on a sidewalk somewhere in Tokyo. Japanese attitudes toward smoking are ironic. In a restaurant? Light up! But outside? Verboten. Litter, apparently, is a greater concern than health. There are small smoking areas on train platforms, and outside stations; these are also some of the few public places where one can find trash cans (always alongside recycling bins -- and some trash cans require that you seperate your garbage into flammable and non-flammable). And yet: sidewalks are clean. Japanese people are just amazingly civil.

Vending Machine, New Koyo Hotel. Japanese attitudes toward drinking, on the other hand, are ... wonderful. Japanese men are famous for embarassing displays of public drunkenness, but not violence, and drinking in public remains legal. And cheap cans of biiru -- 200 yen is about $1.80 -- can be purchased from vending machines, convenience stores ... anywhere, really. And yes, a variety of products can be purchased from vending machines, although what I saw most were sodas, bottled water, and coffee drinks. The machines, however, are everywhere; they can even be found on street corners in residential neighborhoods.