[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.