Day 3: Ueno and Asakusa (Or: The Day We Should Have Checked the Weather App)
We started the day late — deliberately. After yesterday’s marathon, sleeping in felt less like laziness and more like a strategic decision. Today’s agenda was refreshingly simple: wander Ueno, then make our way to Asakusa.
Of course, the universe has a sense of humor. After yesterday’s rain and wind, today dawned bright and sunny — the exact conditions we’d wanted for our planned trip to Gotemba and Hakone (hello, Mount Fuji views). Lesson learned, filed under “check the forecast before committing to an itinerary,” never to be applied again until the next trip.
Exploring Ueno
Our Airbnb was a short, unhurried walk from Ueno Station, which made Ueno Park our obvious first stop. Ueno itself is one of Tokyo’s great cultural clusters — a district that packs a zoo, several major museums, a shrine, temples, and one enormous park into a surprisingly walkable area. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you plan to see one thing and accidentally spend the whole day.
Ueno Park is one of Japan’s oldest public parks, and it shows in the best way — sprawling, leafy, dotted with ponds, temples, and museums that seem to appear every few hundred meters. We strolled through and ducked into one of the shrines tucked inside the park grounds, a quiet, gold-accented structure that felt like a deliberate pause button in the middle of a very busy park. It’s a good reminder that even Tokyo’s most-visited green spaces have corners built for stillness.
From there, we lost several very happy hours inside the National Museum of Nature and Science. Fabio was completely locked in — the kind of engrossed where you have to physically remind someone that lunch exists. The museum covers an enormous range, from dinosaur skeletons and space exploration exhibits to deep dives into Japan’s natural history and traditional technology. It’s genuinely one of the better science museums we’ve been to, well worth the half-day it quietly demands of you.
We refueled at the museum cafeteria (surprisingly solid for museum food) and then rode up to the rooftop mini garden — a small, unexpected patch of green with planted beds and a quiet view over the surrounding rooftops. It’s not a headline attraction, but it’s a nice five-minute reset after hours of exhibits, and a good spot to sit before heading back out into the park.
Cherry blossom tip: if you’re visiting in late March to early April, Ueno is the place to be. The park’s main avenue is lined with around 800 Somei-Yoshino cherry trees, a spot so beloved for blossom viewing it was immortalized in haiku by Matsuo Bashō centuries ago. Hundreds of thousands of people show up daily during peak bloom for hanami parties, and during the official Sakura Matsuri, the park strings up a thousand lanterns for nighttime viewing — equal parts atmospheric and practical, since wandering under blooming trees in the dark is a lot easier with some light.
Asakusa
From Ueno, we hopped the subway to Asakusa — it’s a direct, no-fuss ride on the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, taking around 15–20 minutes and dropping you right near the neighborhood’s main attractions. Easily one of the more painless transit connections in the city.
Asakusa is old Tokyo distilled into one district — this is where Sensō-ji, the city’s oldest and most significant Buddhist temple, calls home. You enter through the famous Kaminarimon (“Thunder Gate”), with its enormous red lantern, then walk down Nakamise-dori, a shopping street packed with souvenir stalls and snack vendors that’s been operating in some form for centuries. At the end of it, the temple itself opens up — incense curling from a large bronze burner, a five-story pagoda nearby, and a steady flow of visitors tossing coins, ringing bells, and drawing paper fortunes (omikuji) to see what luck awaits them.
Come evening, Asakusa shifts personality entirely. The temple and surrounding streets light up for night illumination, and depending on the season, you might stumble into a festival — Sanja Matsuri in spring is the big one, with portable shrines paraded through the streets, but smaller seasonal events pop up throughout the year too.
Tip: rent a kimono. We saw plenty of visitors doing this near the temple, and it makes for genuinely stunning photos against the traditional backdrop — arguably one of the most photogenic combinations in the city.
Tokyo Skytree
From Asakusa, we kept walking toward the day’s final stop: Tokyo Skytree, the tallest structure in Japan and one of the tallest towers in the world. Two observation decks — one around 350 meters, one around 450 — offer sweeping views over the city, and on a clear day (like ours), you can spot Mount Fuji on the horizon. The base also houses Tokyo Solamachi, a shopping and dining complex, so it’s easy to fold in a meal or a coffee break before or after going up.
Closing Thought
We wrapped the day walking back to Asakusa for dinner. Despite being one of Tokyo’s most touristed neighborhoods, it still hides restaurants that locals actually frequent — and at one of them, I had, without exaggeration, the best grilled mackerel of my life. No fishy aftertaste, just perfectly charred skin and flaky, rich flesh. Sometimes the best souvenir from a touristy area is proof that it hasn’t entirely sold out.
