Hilma

Four days of skyscrapers and crossings, and I finally did what Tokyoites themselves do on a Sunday: I went up. Fifty minutes on the Keio Line from Shinjuku and the city simply stops being the city. Mount Takao stands 599 metres above Hachiōji, inside Meiji no Mori Takao Quasi-National Park, and it receives over 2.5 million walkers a year — the world's most-hiked mountain, they say, and you feel it in the good-humoured traffic on the path.

I rode the funicular halfway up, past the slope where the famous octopus cedar — Takosugi, some five hundred years old, thirty-seven metres tall — keeps its hundred-year-old company. Then Trail 1, paved and lantern-lit, climbs to Takaosan Yakuōin Yūkiji, a Shingon Buddhist temple founded in 744 on the orders of Emperor Shōmu, its founder Gyōki the same priest tied to the Great Buddha at Tōdaiji in Nara. Thirteen centuries is a long time for a building to keep watch over one city's edge, and the temple wears it lightly. What it keeps watch with is the tengu: the long-nosed mountain goblins of Japanese folklore, guardians of the peak, carved in wood at every turn — fierce, mischievous, patient. Shugendō mountain ascetics still train here, and you can feel that discipline in the air, that sense that this is not a park but a sacred mountain that happens to have a vending machine.

At the summit the haze ate the horizon — September in Tokyo is humidity's season — but the shape of Shinjuku's towers rose faintly to the south, and somewhere in the grey, Fuji's silhouette kept its own counsel. I ate tororo soba at a long-established shop near the cable car: the grated mountain yam over cold buckwheat noodles, a bowl that tastes like the climb itself. Then down Trail 1 past the monkey park and the cedar shade, and at the base, the 599 Museum — an ecology museum named for the mountain's height — and the Keio Takaosan Onsen Gokurakuyu, where hikers soak the climb out of their legs.

I skipped the Louvre exhibition's opening week for this. No regrets. The city keeps a wild green lung sixty minutes from its centre, and it breathes slowly there.

Tokyo Gendai 2026 — Pacifico Yokohama, Sep 11–13 (VIP Sep 10): the city's contemporary art fair, galleries from across Asia and beyond in one hall. A strong, concentrated way to see what's moving in the region's art right now; tickets sell out closer to the date, so book ahead.

TENNOZ ART WEEK 2026, Sep 10–13: an island of galleries on Tennōzu Isle — the warehouse district across from Shinagawa — opens its doors for four days of shows across some 40 venues. Free to walk, best on a weekend afternoon when the galleries are alive.

Synchronic Constellation: Cross-boundary Perspectives in Art — Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), opens this month, Kiyosumi-Shirakawa. The museum's building by Kunio Maekawa, with its concrete columns and reflecting pool, is worth the trip alone.

Albert Marquet and the Sea — SOMPO Museum of Art, Shinjuku, starts this month: the French painter's quiet views of ports and rivers, watercolour-bright and spare. If you read me on the mountain and want the opposite mood — a painting of stillness seen from a room — this is it.

Tororo soba is the mountain's own dish — the generous local portion of grated yam over chilled buckwheat noodles — and Takahashiya, the shop at the foot of the cable car, has been pulling noodles since 1836. They sell the dried soba and the grated-yam pack to take home; one taste on your own kitchen counter will bring the cedar smell back.

Tengu charms from Yakuōin: the temple sells small wooden omamori bearing the guardian's face — fierce enough to be lucky. A long-nosed friend for your keychain.

And if you're travelling light, just take the phrase: soba o taberu — to eat soba at the top of the mountain is a Tokyo Sunday, in two words.

On a day spent in the city's green, a thought for its people: Second Harvest Japan (2HJ), Chiyoda-ku — Japan's first incorporated food bank — rescues surplus food from shops and farms and gets it to families, children's cafeterias and community kitchens across Tokyo. The mountain above, the hunger below: both are real. If you'd like to help, they welcome food donations dropped at their pantry (Tue–Sat mornings) and monetary gifts online — no need to be a resident.