Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2001

As the workday ends, its trail of tickets, pings, docs, and comments clings like static. Still, the personal to-do list waits its turn. There are emails to answer, chats to catch up on, payments to make, and a stream of technological advancements to stay abreast of. More often than not, though, social media claims the evening. The mind needs rest, a pause to sort through its own clutter, but a psyche wired for productivity prefers distraction. We sit, unlock the screen, and begin accumulating new layers of mental residue. The something closest to doing nothing may now be scrolling.

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking¹, now 24 years old, still speaks with relevance to the psychic strain of contemporary life. With hindsight, the pressures of a production-oriented culture she described were only just beginning to register. Thinking continues to be regarded, in many contexts, as doing nothing. Yet the imperative to account for every pause and to justify each moment as productive has intensified exponentially.

As for walking as a remedy, physical activity has declined across much of the developed world due to the increase in sedentary work, the rise of technology, and the enduring dominance of the car. Walking grows increasingly absent from the average to-do list. But despite everything, from the early internet era to present day, and through a career spent behind screens, I’ve kept walking. More than anything, I owe that to Japan.

Much of Japan is remarkably walkable, but few places stir my wanderlust like Tokyo. I returned late last week from a three-week stint in the city, where most days involved at least 10,000 steps, and many exceeded 20,000 or 30,000. While in Tokyo, I’m at my least productive in terms of ticking off tasks; the to-do list I come home to is invariably daunting. But as Solnit observes, walking draws out thought, and I’ve noticed a correlation between step count and the clarity of those thoughts. As much as I enjoy Japan’s recreational delights, it turns out this is where I come to think.

Tokyothèque typically explores Tokyo’s design and culture, but one thread runs through it all: whatever the subject, your author is on foot. Recently, all that walking led to thinking about walking, and about why walking in Tokyo, of all places, feels so rewarding. This week, I zoom out from the city to share a few thoughts on the act of walking itself, and on the ways in which I walk through Tokyo.

The Station Circuit

For my fifth birthday, I told my father I wanted to ride a train. So on the day, he took me to the local station. We boarded a train and travelled about fifteen minutes north, passing through villages and hamlets to reach the next town. It was a perceptive gesture on his part. At five, the world is measured in shorter strides. You don’t need to go far to feel distance and time. To me, it felt like a grand journey.

We spent the afternoon walking. The town we visited had few things to do, but doing something was not the point. We looped around the riverbanks and the country park, threading through the town centre via the museum and a church. The details are fuzzy, but I recall the train ride home clearly: golden hour sun filtering through the carriage, feet aching, pleasantly spent.

This childhood vignette came back to me during a recent Tokyo neighbourhood walk. The fundamentals, I realised, remain much the same: I ride to a station, make a loop around the area, and weave back through it, ending either where I began or at a nearby stop. Spending an entire afternoon within a tight radius like this, you come to know the terrain with unexpected depth.

Solnit references Thoreau’s lecture Walking, later published as an essay², in which he suggests that even a modest loop, beginning and ending at one’s doorstep, can take on the quality of a personal pilgrimage:

Every walk is a sort of crusade … Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out … Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of Dahomey.

Unchanged since Thoreau first gave his lecture in 1851, the neighbourhood walk remains a small act of departure within the bounds of everyday life. In Tokyo, it’s why I often suggest the Station Circuit walk to anyone wishing to understand the city in pockets, especially those for whom walking isn’t a regular habit.

The Station Circuit offers a moderately paced walk that meets many of the hopes we bring to travel—chances to step into local shops and restaurants, to learn something of the area’s history, customs, and landmarks; to take in its topography, infrastructure, architecture, and everyday streetscape. Most of the neighbourhood walking maps I publish follow this format. It's a steadily growing collection, featuring places like Daikanyama³, Jimbōchō⁴, and Monzen-Nakachō⁵.

Stations like these are surrounded by exciting neighbourhoods, rich with activity, but at times, I find myself drawn to Station Circuits where there’s less going on. The discovery process begins with a check-in: without rational thought, am I in the mood for the inner city or the outskirts? Riverside or roadside? Hills or harbour? Tokyo holds all of these within its bounds. Once the feeling is clear, it leads me to a general part of the map. I zoom in, making a shortlist of possible starting stations. Interchanges, termini, and stops near parks or bridges are good options—places with just enough urban flow despite being set back from the main current.

Sometimes, though not always, the loosely planned walk yields something extraordinary. That was the case when I chose Musashi-Itsukaichi Station. What began as a gentle summer circuit expanded into a route through historic hillsides, ancient temples, neighbourhood architecture, and local encounters. It eventually led to a book⁶ and a decision to reconfigure my working life. That’s the power the Station Circuit holds for me. It carries me back to that golden hour feeling on the train home: pleasantly spent, with the feeling that the day had been enough.

The Waypoint Connection

I’m quite comfortable with solitude. Socially, I gravitate toward one-on-one meetings or small group settings where conversations can naturally flow into deeper waters. In contrast, larger gatherings tend to fragment attention, with constant topic shifts and the background noise of overlapping voices. Even in smaller groups, though, I have to watch my social battery. It drains more quickly these days.

Working from home or my own studio has suited me well over the years. But paired with my temperament, it carries a risk. The boundary between a healthy degree of solitude and negative patterns of isolation is easily blurred. For that, there is the city walk. The simple act of standing up, putting on shoes, and stepping outside becomes a natural defence against disconnection.

Travellers know that on the road, conversation often deepens quickly. Travel alters the conditions under which we relate to others. Freed from the usual context, we speak more openly, and conversing with those beyond our own milieu becomes mutually perspective-shifting while a shared sense of uncertainty creates solidarity. Travel’s inherently reflective nature heightens all this: the contrast between new and familiar, the disruption of routine, the sensory density of place.

More importantly, there’s often an unspoken time limit. Travellers, aware they may never meet again, tend to move quickly beyond small talk, leaning into more meaningful exchange. Ichigo ichie (一期一会) captures this dynamic. The perhaps familiar four-character Japanese idiom reflects the idea that no encounter, whether with a person, place, or moment, will ever happen in quite the same way again. It urges us to attend to what is here, and to savour it fully.

One doesn’t need to go backpacking on a round-the-world ticket to experience the essence of interpersonal ichigo ichie. Walking in any city, at home or abroad, makes room for it. It lives in encounters at coffee shops, in passing conversations with shopkeepers, in spontaneous exchanges in parks and squares. Sometimes it surfaces when a stranger asks for directions, and the moment lingers slightly longer than expected.

Solnit gestures toward this essence in her reflections on the walking life of Søren Kierkegaard, often considered the first existentialist philosopher:

Kierkegaard almost never received guests at home, and indeed, throughout his life he almost never had anyone he could call a friend, though he had a vast acquaintance. One of his nieces says that the streets of Copenhagen were his “reception room,” and Kierkegaard’s great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters.

Tokyo is especially well suited to Kierkegaard-style encounters. Its near-infinite network of tiny bars and coffee shops feels built for them. Take a seat at the counter, offer a brief introduction, and a one-time exchange with the owner or nearby patrons will often begin. To encourage this, the Waypoint Walk proves a useful frame.

This kind of walk begins with choosing a category. Off-piste kissatens, independent record shops, and local museums are often my starting points. You might also mix and match—bookshops, a gallery, a few pocket parks, and a small shrine. To plan, you’ll either want a personal Rolodex of saved pins or a little online digging to shortlist a few locations.

For a while now, I’ve kept the Tokyothèque Master Map, which lives in the members area, as an archive of each location mentioned in the newsletter or on Instagram. One way to use it is as inspiration for planning Waypoint Walks. I made an update to the map today, adding all the stops from my recent trip, along with several that had been pending from earlier newsletters.

With pins placed on the map, the next step is to draw a loose box around a subset that seems to match the time and distance you’re aiming for. These become your waypoints. From there, use Google Maps’ multi-stop directions tool to plot a route between them. In trying to calculate the fastest path, Google often defaults to Tokyo’s smaller lanes and backstreets thanks to the city’s Edo-period layout. If it does put you on a long, arterial road, try shifting a street or two sideways to stay in the quieter grid running alongside.

At its simplest, the Waypoint Walk connects places. However, there’s the option to toggle on a layer of ichigo ichie. With each stop, make one attempt to open a conversation and see where it goes. For the more introverted, it might feel like a stretch, but it’s a low-stakes chance to try a little Japanese, and it often brings unexpected returns. By the final waypoint, you may find yourself just a little more fluent in the art of connection.

The Axis

The recollections and introspections I’ve shared today are just a few of those that surfaced during my recent week-long walk along Tokyo’s Chūō Line. The line gradually bends in places: as it extends from the western sprawl of Hachiōji to Tachikawa, as it passes through the central Shinjuku and Chiyoda wards, and then as it arcs around Tokyo Bay. But overall, it embodies what I think of as the Axis Walk: two points set at either end of a long, mostly straight path and the journey that stretches between them.

What an Axis Walk is not is a pilgrimage. I documented the Chūō walk in daily instalments through Field Notes, a time-sensitive newsletter⁷. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s no spoiler to say that Chiba Station, my final stop, was as agreeable as any major JR station, but nothing extraordinary. I always knew this to be the case. I wasn’t walking to get somewhere; I was walking to be somewhere.

Before setting off, I outlined the route on a custom map. It’s a medium–to–long axis walk that often defaults to main roads, giving it a deceptively simple appearance. But like a stock chart viewed up close, the finer details show countless minor deviations. The route between stations, particularly through western Tokyo and Chiba, frequently passed through the quotidian: neighbourhoods so quiet you might walk some time without even seeing a vending machine. 

At one point, I came to a fork in a residential street that had been following the flow of a brook. Pursuing the water seemed the natural choice, so I turned, passing a group of children playing in a nearby sandpit. They watched as I went. Before long, the brook disappeared underground, and the path ended in a snug cul-de-sac—utterly impassable. I assume some of the children lived there and knew the layout well, though no one warned the passing stranger. When I returned, they were still there, trading glances and giggling among themselves.

Against the backdrop of brute-forcing my way along a major stretch of urban infrastructure, this was as small and delicate a moment as one could imagine, and there were many others like it. It felt like a scene from Aruku Hito (歩くひと), Jirō Taniguchi’s manga, whose title translates to ‘walking person’. The story, entitled The Walking Man in English, follows a mild-mannered businessman who walks simply to inhabit his days more fully. He wanders suburban streets, pauses by a birdbath, watches children at play, or turns a corner because the light falls just so. His walks are unspectacular in the best possible way.

An Axis Walk encourages the Aruku Hito mindset: a route without a fixed goal that invites diversion, where meaning gathers in the walking itself—in wrong turns, fleeting encounters, and moments unplanned. The format suits shorter walks just as well: a shopping street⁸, a greenway tracing a buried ankyō⁹, a stretch along a tram line. In place of the many chapters of a cross-city or even regional axis, you get something lighter, more contained yet often more obviously themed.

However long the walk, these ideas—the Station Circuit, the Waypoint Connection, the Axis—offer a framework. We might observe like The Walking Man, crusade like Thoreau, connect like Kierkegaard, or, like Solnit, simply think. To walk without agenda or utility is, in its own way, a refusal of urgency. A way to reclaim time and live among the details.

Until we meet on the trail,

AJ

Everything shared today—the guides, maps, resources, and a generous discount on the book—is included with membership.

That wasn’t always the case. I started by posting everything freely. But this year, I stepped away from full-time work to give Tokyothèque my full attention—to write with more depth, walk with more intent, and bring you closer to the city.

To make that possible, Tokyothèque became a membership publication. For the cost of a coffee at the kissaten each month, members receive:

• Neighbourhood Walking Maps: a growing collection of curated routes plus every new map I publish.
• The Complete Archive: full access to all past newsletters (67 and counting), including every neighbourhood guide and future edition.
• Monthly Monographs: long-form members-only essays decoding Tokyo element by element and helping you see the city through trained eyes.
• Field Notes: time-sensitive dispatches written live during walks and travels across Japan.

Or, if you’ve simply enjoyed the free newsletter and it’s added something to your week, membership is a way to keep reading, keep walking, and help it continue.

References

¹ Wanderlust: A History of Walking
² Thoreau's Walking

Resources

³ Daikanyama Sightline
⁴ Jinbochō: Book Town
⁵ Monzen-Nakachō: Temple Town
⁶ Slow Tokyo: Exurban Exploring
⁷ Field Notes: The Chūō Line
⁸ All Along the Shōtengai
⁹ Ankyo Redemption