Marunouchi is the part of Tokyo that decided to look like itself again. The red-brick station was built in 1914, lost its top floors to wartime fire, stood stunted for sixty years, and was rebuilt to its full height in 2012 — and the district around it spent the same decade turning a grid of offices into a place you'd choose to walk. Two and a half kilometres, an afternoon, the marble at one end and the railway arches at the other.
Start outside the station facade and walk back across the plaza until the two domes read as one building. Then into KITTE, the old post office kept as a white atrium, and up to its sixth-floor roof garden — free, and the place to watch the Shinkansen come and go over the tracks.
Down to Marunouchi Naka-dori, the tree-lined boulevard, and walk it slowly past the Mitsubishi Ichigokan — an 1894 brick block rebuilt brick-for-brick, with a quiet courtyard garden behind. Past the Meiji Seimei Kan colonnade, a real survivor among the replicas.
End under the Yurakucho arches, where izakaya are jammed into the railway viaduct and the trains pass over your head while you eat. Yurakucho station is right there.
