Tokyo

With state-of-the-art gadgetry, cult fashion and mind-blowing department stores – plus ’Lost in Translation‘ moments along the way – Tokyo is the place to go for thoroughly modern retail kicks.

The pavements are thronged with people, all of them extremely well behaved: they won’t even think of crossing the road until the traffic lights say they can. The roads are crammed with slow-moving, strangely unfamiliar cars, so retro you’d think they were ancient but for the fact that they gleam. Electronic advertising hoardings sing quaint tum-ti-tum tunes for even the most sober and serious of sales messages. Welcome to Tokyo.

Japan is another planet, it’s said, but Tokyo is also one of the most exciting, engaging places you can land. Although it’s one of the most expensive cities in the world, it still has much to offer the chic shopper. To beat the jetlag, sleep on an overnight flight (12 hours) which gets you in at 9am, ready to go.

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Start in the city’s most famous shopping district, Ginza, in the heart of this vast metropolis. Smart and elegant, the streets are safe and – though invariably busy – welcoming. On the main drag, also called Ginza, you’ll find labyrinthine department stores such as Mitsukoshi and Matsuya, both of which have enormous food halls in their basements. A few doors down, there’s one of the biggest branches of super-cheap clothes chain Uniqlo (T-shirts for less than a fiver!), and not far away a Muji and US import Barneys. As a good pit-stop between shops, you can enjoy excellent views of the area from the twenty-eighth-floor bar at the nearby Conrad Tokyo hotel in Shiodome and sample the menu at its Gordon Ramsay restaurant, Cerise (one of two he owns in the hotel). If you want to buy electronics, don’t miss BIC Camera, a multi-storey shop with wall-to-wall high-definition flat-screen TVs, bargain-price digital cameras and much more.

Gadget fiends should also visit Akihabara, known as Electric Town, the huge street of electronics shops which is further afield. Take the Ginza Line subway train to Shimbashi then go four stops to Akihabara on the Yamanote Line, and you’ll be engulfed by neon-lit tech shops the second you step outside the station.

Tsukiji fish market - for your sushi needs

Early risers and those too jetlagged to sleep should make the most of their predicament with a visit to Tsukiji fish market which sells every sort of seafood (it’s not on every morning, so check with your concierge first). Get there by 6am to see the tuna auction, which is loud, frenzied and intense – like the London Stock Exchange with an ocean tang. There’s freshly caught fish from all over the world, ranging from horse mackerel to puffer fish and Walleye Pollock roe. The future of this historic market is ominously described as ‘under discussion’ and it may be moved elsewhere, so catch it while you can.

To the west of the centre is Omotesando, where the shops themselves are the destination. The Prada store here was designed by Herzog + de Meuron, the team responsible for Tate Modern, and is a breathtaking, multi-storey, glass structure. Next door is Comme des Garçons in a splendid, swooping-walled, curvy building by Future Systems, and nearby is A Bathing Ape, the deeply cool Japanese label with a sister store in Soho’s Upper James Street. There’s also Omotesando Hills, a shopping centre where the floors corkscrew around so you need never take the stairs.