Tokyo rewards thin wallets: the best skyline views come from free municipal observatories, the shrines charge nothing, and a filling meal costs ¥500 at a standing counter. Three days of free towers, ¥150 yakitori and markets the tour buses never reach.
Kenzo Tange's 1991 twin towers hide Tokyo's best free view: the 202m South Observatory, open 09:30–22:00 and closed the 1st and 3rd Tuesday. On clear winter mornings Mt Fuji sits on the horizon past Shinjuku's skyline.
Tokyo's grandest Shinto shrine sits inside a 70-hectare man-made forest of 100,000 trees donated from across Japan in 1920. Entry to the wooded approach and main hall is free from 05:00 to sunset; only the Inner Garden's iris field charges.
The Setagaya temple where the beckoning-cat legend began: a hillside shelf holds well over a thousand white maneki-neko left by visitors, each one a granted wish. Grounds are free, open 06:00–18:00, with a cat-carved pagoda behind.
Golden Gai packs roughly 280 bars into six alleys of two-storey postwar shacks, and walking them before the 19:00 rush costs nothing. Adjacent Hanazono Shrine is free, open around the clock, and hosts an antique flea market on Sundays.
Four hundred stalls crammed under the Yamanote viaduct between Ueno and Okachimachi, born as a 1945 black market for sugar and American surplus. Dried fish, ¥100 cut-fruit cups and shouted discounts after 16:00.
A 170m parade of about 60 family-run shops below the Yuyake Dandan staircase, in one of the few shitamachi pockets the 1945 firebombing missed. Grilled skewers, ¥120 croquettes and menchi-katsu eaten on your feet.
A 670m shopping street of roughly 180 shops in eastern Tokyo with almost no foreign visitors — the cheapest lunch corridor in the city. Standing bars pour beer from 11:00 and delis sell oden by the piece.
Sixty smoke-blackened stalls in narrow alleys west of Shinjuku station, running as a drinking row since 1946. Yakitori and motsu-nikomi stew go for ¥150–250 a skewer, and most counters seat only six or seven people.
The 25th-floor lounge of Bunkyo ward's town hall is free, open 09:00–20:30, and faces due west over Shinjuku's tower cluster, the Tokyo Dome roof and — on clear winter days — Mt Fuji. Closed the third Sunday monthly.
One of Tokyo's oldest shrines, rebuilt in 1706 and never bombed, with a tunnel of a thousand vermilion torii climbing the hillside behind the main hall. Grounds are free, open 06:00–17:00, and 3,000 azalea bushes bloom in April.
A Meiji stroll garden laid out by Mitsubishi founder Iwasaki Yataro, who shipped 55 famous stones here on his own cargo boats. The isowatari stepping-stone path crosses the carp pond inches above the water.
Sangenjaya's 26th-floor observatory is free and open until 20:00, closed the second Wednesday. It looks straight down the Setagaya tram line to a west-facing sunset, with Mt Fuji silhouetted beyond Shinjuku on clear evenings.