[tkgally]

That’s quite a walk! Where did you start and end?

For about ten years, I walked every New Year’s Day from my home near Yokohama Station to somewhere in Tokyo—Ikebukuro or Ueno or Asakusa, about 35 kilometers one way. Very memorable, as you say.

I don’t think I would do it in the summer, though.

[famahar]

Started in Hachiōji and ended at the start of Chiba prefecture. The heat made it tough. I was thinking about doing a walk from Tamagawa station to Yokohama this weekend. I love seeing what's between all the stations and building up a new mental map of the area.

[tkgally]

You might want to start in Yokohama and walk north to Tamagawa Station. Then you won’t have the sun in your eyes so much. (That factor is more important to consider in the winter, though, when the sun is low and the sky is often very clear.)

Enjoy your walk! I did that route only once, and it might be the nicest one. My usual route was parallel to the Keihin Tohoku Line—Tsurumi, Kawasaki, Kamata, Omori, Shinagawa, etc. A bit industrial, but not bad on New Year’s Day.

There aren’t many possible routes because there are very few bridges over the Tama River.

[ninjin]

Indeed, I was about to comment on it being a lovely and enjoyable idea to stroll through Tokyo. But doing so with peak temperatures in the mid-30s may make it much more challenging as I know I personally would need to dive into convenience stores now and then just to cool down.

Seconding building a mental map of the city, although I did so by biking for many many years. Only took a few weeks to feel confident about getting pretty much anywhere in Tokyo on a bike.

[tkgally]

Yes, building a mental map was one of my original motivations for walking from Yokohama to Tokyo. When I did the walk for the first time, in 2006, I was working in Tokyo and had traveled between it and my home in Yokohama hundreds of times, but only by train. I worried that, if I were in Tokyo when a big earthquake struck, I wouldn’t be sure about the best route for walking home. After walking the other direction a couple of times, I stopped worrying about that.

On the day when I could have actually put my newly acquired geographical sense to good use—March 11, 2011—I happened to leave for Osaka a few hours before the quake struck. All of my colleagues either walked home or slept in the office that night, while I had a comfortable hotel room in Namba.

[resolutebat]

If, on the other hand, you experience Tokyo mostly by train/subway, your mental map is a bunch of islands, and it can be weird when you walk your way from one to another and suddenly your mental compass shifts. For the longest time, I thought the Hachiko crossing was east of Shibuya station, and my mind was blown when I walked to Shibuya from Roppongi and realized I had it backwards.

[johnwalkr]

My mental model of Tokyo changed a lot when rental scooters became available. Especially traveling East-West, there are a lot of places much closer together than you'd think from the subway maps.

[ghaff]

Especially in areas where a lot of subway lines get close together, subway maps often expand the area so you can be better see the stations/relationship between the lines. I tended to mostly take the subway into Boston as an undergrad and generally only walked in a fairly small area of the city. I remember once doing multiple line changes and realizing afterwards that my destination was about 3 blocks from where I started.