Tokyo

Fourteen million people in the city, thirty-seven million across the metropolitan area – and the thing that will strike you on your first morning is how quiet it is. Nobody talks on the trains. There is no litter and somehow almost no bins. Taxi doors swing open by themselves. Someone has turned the volume of the world down by about a third, and it takes a full day to stop finding that uncanny and start finding it wonderful.

Tokyo also has no middle, which I think is the key to loving it. It is a federation of downtowns – Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza, Asakusa, Roppongi – each with its own skyline and crowd and personality, laced together by trains that arrive exactly when they say they will. Treat it as one city and you will spend your holiday underground. Treat it as five small cities and it opens right up.

So this is the Rolodex, arranged the way the city actually works: by neighbourhood. Where to stay in each, what to eat, what is genuinely worth your morning. The practical scaffolding – airports, trains, what to book – is in the Primer.