Tokyo Is Expensive

I never expected to see any of it. A budget traveler, I usually frequent chicken buses and $3 hostels in inexpensive Latin American countries. Tokyo, in contrast, just ended a 14-year reign as the world's most expensive city, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's rankings. Oslo claimed the top spot earlier this year, but flying around the globe to visit the world's second-most-expensive city still didn't strike me as a cheap vacation.

Then I chanced upon a $484 round-trip fare to Tokyo from Atlanta, where I live. So I took a deep breath, booked and immediately started scheming ways to see Tokyo on the cheap.

It was surprisingly easy. For five of seven nights, I paid $17 for a dormitory bunk at a small hotel in an older part of town. I ate $5 meals at countertop restaurants and Japanese fast-food chains (think rice and noodles, not burgers), never spending more than $15 anywhere. And I sought out free showrooms, cheap Kabuki and all the gratis sightseeing I could pack into a week.

What I quickly discovered, however, is that Tokyo's assault on your senses comes complimentary.

Nowhere did the onslaught come more literally, viscerally and exhilaratingly than in Tsukiji, home to one of the world's biggest fish markets. If this doesn't sound like a tourist attraction, it doesn't really try to be. Arriving just after 6 a.m. -- this is an early-morning affair -- I dodged rickshaws carting 300-pound frozen tuna, tiny flatbed carts puttering like lawn mowers and restaurateurs shouldering their way down narrow walkways lined with every edible sea creature imaginable.

There were metal trays of bloody eels, Styrofoam boxes of purplish octopus, tanks of live lobsters and all sorts of fish staring, cold and one-eyed, from beds of ice. Forging into the market's bowels, I found workers slinging torpedo-like frozen tuna across a concrete floor with hooks, then decapitating them with circular saws. A little gruesome, maybe, but I still had plenty of appetite for $11.50 worth of ultra-fresh sashimi at a stand on the way out.

The market, I realized, summarized how Tokyo intoxicates: by overwhelming your mental filters and exploding across your neurons as pure sensation. The effect can be confusing, disorienting, alienating -- you need a human connection, a translator to decipher the impossibly foreign world whirling past you.

Luckily, you can get it almost free.

* * *

Tomoko Ikeuchi, a then-28-year-old gerontology graduate student, met me by the Shinjuku Metro station just after 10 a.m. on a windy Sunday in March. She'd first e-mailed me a week earlier, shortly after I contacted Tokyo Free Guide, one of several guide services that charge only the costs of their volunteers' subway fares, admission fees and other expenses.

In our e-mails, I'd waffled about what I wanted to see, at first mentioning an interest in Kichijoji, a hip, collegiate area near Tomoko's home. But my senses needed a break, so I'd finally told her I wanted something peaceful -- temples, gardens, maybe an old part of town.

She led me to Shinjuku Gyoen, a 144-acre park with British, French and Japanese-style gardens. We strolled across the straw-colored winter grass, watching families picnic beneath the season's first cherry blossoms and chatting easily in English.