Tokyo has enough genuinely worthwhile things to do that the challenge isn't finding them — it's choosing between them. Here are ten that consistently earn their place on a first visit, organised loosely by type rather than by neighbourhood, since several of these are worth a special trip on their own. Senso-ji, in Asakusa, is Tokyo's oldest temple and the most obvious starting point for most visitors. The approach through the lantern-lined Nakamise shopping street is part of the experience, but go at dawn if you want the temple grounds without a crowd, or in the evening when the five-story pagoda is lit against the dark. Shibuya Crossing is worth seeing at least once purely for scale — several hundred people crossing from every direction at once, repeating every two minutes. The Shibuya Sky observation deck above Shibuya Station gives you the same view from a calmer vantage point, with the added bonus of seeing how far the crossing's chaos actually extends. The Tsukiji Outer Market remains a genuine food destination even though the old wholesale auction relocated to Toyosu. Go hungry and go early — fresh sushi for breakfast, tamagoyaki, and grilled seafood skewers from stalls that have been there for decades. Meiji Shrine, tucked into forest near Harajuku, is one of the few places in central Tokyo where the city noise genuinely disappears. It's a short walk from Takeshita Street, making the two a useful pairing if you want quiet and chaos back to back. TeamLab's digital art installations are the rare "tourist attraction" that consistently lives up to the hype — immersive, photogenic, and unlike anything most visitors have experienced before. Book tickets well in advance, and check current venue details before you go, since the exhibition has moved locations over the years. The Imperial Palace East Gardens offer free, spacious grounds that are rarely crowded, even on weekends — a useful counterbalance if the rest of your trip has been wall-to-wall crowds and neon. Shinjuku's Golden Gai and Omoide Yokocho are two adjacent pockets of tiny alleyway bars and yakitori stalls, most seating six to eight people. They look intimidating from the outside but are genuinely welcoming once you pick a spot that looks neither empty nor overflowing. Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics and anime district, rewards even visitors with no particular interest in either — multi-story arcades, retro game shops, and a level of sensory overload that's worth experiencing regardless of what you end up buying. A sumo tournament, if your visit happens to align with one of the year's six annual basho, is one of the more memorable things you can do in Tokyo and rarely makes it onto first-timer itineraries. Tickets for day passes are far more accessible than people assume. Finally, a half-day trip to Yanaka, one of the few Tokyo neighbourhoods that escaped both the 1923 earthquake and WWII bombing largely intact, gives a sense of what pre-war Tokyo looked like — narrow lanes, old wooden shopfronts, and a noticeably slower pace than almost anywhere else in the city. None of these require more than a day's planning, and most can be combined two or three to a day depending on how much walking you're up for. The common thread worth remembering: Tokyo rewards picking a neighbourhood and wandering it properly rather than sprinting between famous names on a list.