Pick your stops on the map, and the cost and route order update live. Prices are pilot data for Tokyo — anime and merch shopping, tattoo-friendly sento, and more, with your own lodging budget factored in.
This is a pilot tool covering a small set of Tokyo shops and bathhouses so far — coverage will expand as more guides are published.
What this tool actually does
Most Tokyo trip planners are itinerary templates written by someone who has decided for you what a good day looks like. This one starts from the opposite end: you pick the shops you already want to go to, and it works out the order and the damage.
Three things happen when you select stops on the map. It puts them in a sensible visiting order using a nearest-neighbour route rather than the order you clicked. It adds up a rough cost — transit between the stops, a shopping or entry budget per place, and lodging for the nights you enter. And it suggests a base area to stay in, based on where your stops actually cluster, which is the decision most people get wrong first.
You can switch the display between JPY, USD, EUR, GBP, KRW, CNY and AUD. You enter everything in yen; the tabs only change what you read. Rates are fixed as of the date shown under the tabs, so treat them as indicative rather than live.
How to use it in about two minutes
- Click pins on the map to add stops. Click again to remove one. There is no login and nothing to install.
- Reorder if you disagree. The nearest-neighbour order is a starting point, not gospel — use the arrows and the distance and cost update live. If a shop opens at 14:00, move it later yourself.
- Add anything missing. The “add a place not listed here” search runs on OpenStreetMap, so you can drop in a hotel, a station, a restaurant or a shop we have not covered, and set your own budget for it.
- Enter your dates, nights and lodging tier — budget, mid or high. The tiers are illustrative per-night rates, not quotes.
- Copy the share link to send the whole route to whoever you are travelling with, or to keep it for later. The route is encoded in the link, so there is no account to lose.
What is in the dataset
This is a pilot covering 39 shops and sites across Tokyo and Saitama, drawn from the guides on this site rather than scraped from a directory. That means the coverage is deliberately narrow and deliberately checked: every place in it exists in a guide where we have verified the address and the opening hours for 2026.
Roughly, it covers:
- Record shops — the Shibuya, Shimokitazawa and city-wide picks. Start with the digging guide by neighbourhood if you are not sure which area suits you.
- Vintage and secondhand clothing — Koenji and Shimokitazawa, mapped in the vintage guide by neighbourhood.
- Anime, manga and hobby shopping — Akihabara, Nakano Broadway and Ikebukuro. The Akihabara hub and the Nakano Broadway guide explain what each building is actually for.
- Tattoo-friendly sento and sauna, which are worth putting at the end of a walking day rather than the start.
- A few shrines and pilgrimage sites, for when the shopping is not the whole point.
Coverage grows as guides are published. If a shop you want is not on the map yet, add it through the search box — the cost model will still work, you just set the budget for that stop yourself.
What the cost estimate assumes — and what it does not
The total is a planning number, not a quote. It is built from three parts: transit, estimated from the distance between your stops rather than from a live fare API; a shopping or entry budget per place, which is a heuristic figure for what people typically spend at that kind of shop; and lodging, at the per-night tier you choose multiplied by your nights.
It excludes flights, meals and everything incidental. It does not know about sales, it does not know that you are going to find a ¥12,000 first pressing you were not expecting, and it does not check hotel availability. Use it to answer “is this trip roughly ¥80,000 or roughly ¥200,000”, not to budget to the yen.
It also excludes shipping, and that is the line that surprises people most. A crate of records is heavier than it looks — about twenty LPs and you are at 5kg — and EMS at that weight is ¥15,100 to the United States and ¥13,000 to most of Europe. Three ways around it, in the order worth considering: pay your airline for a second checked bag, walk the box into a post office and send it home rather than dragging it through two more neighbourhoods, or don’t carry it at all and buy the heavy things after you get back through a proxy service like Buyee, which charges a flat ¥500 per order plus domestic and international shipping. The third one is also the only option that works for a shop that does not ship abroad itself.
One thing worth doing before you finalise the shopping line: read the tax-free guide. From 1 November 2026 Japan switches to a refund-at-departure system, so you pay the full tax-inclusive price in the shop and claim the 10% back at the airport. That changes your cash flow on the trip even though it does not change the final cost.
Building a day around the route
A few things the map cannot tell you, which will wreck an otherwise good plan:
- Do not start early. Independent shops in Tokyo open at 13:00 or 14:00. Chains and department stores open at 10:00 or 11:00. Put the chains first and the small shops after lunch, not the other way round.
- Wednesday is the common closing day for independent shops, and it catches people out badly in Koenji in particular — see the Koenji guide for which shops close when.
- Cluster by area, not by category. Two record shops in the same neighbourhood beat four spread across the Yamanote line. The route optimiser will do this for you if you give it enough stops to work with.
- Plan for the bags. Records and vinyl-era hardware are heavy. Coin lockers at major stations fill up by mid-morning on weekends; a hotel that lets you drop bags between stops is worth more than a hotel that is slightly closer.
- First trip to Japan? Sort the IC card, the eSIM and Visit Japan Web before you worry about the route — the survival guide covers all three.
Two things the planner cannot cost for you. If you want the first afternoon guided rather than improvised, Klook runs a half-day Akihabara walk with an anime-fan guide that pairs well with a Nakano or Ikebukuro afternoon on the same route. And if the day goes the way these days usually go, Buyee will forward what does not fit in your case — or buy on Yahoo Auctions and Mercari Japan for anything you saw and left behind.
Known limits
This is a prototype and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The dataset is small. Prices are heuristic. Exchange rates are fixed at the date shown, not live. The route is a nearest-neighbour approximation, which is good enough for a walking day and not a true shortest path. There is no live opening-hours check, so a shop that closes on Wednesdays will still appear on a Wednesday route — that is what the guides are for.
If something in it is wrong, or a shop has moved, tell us and we will fix the dataset.