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Map of Tokyo
At the heart of the world's largest city there is a void: the grounds of the Imperial Palace, ringed by moats. Around it, a fabric of streets unlike that of any European city.
What you see on the map
The Imperial Palace. The old Edo castle, with its moats and stone walls: a large green patch surrounded by water, with the East Gardens and Kitanomaru Park to the north.
The moats. The outer ones once traced a spiral around the castle; stretches remain and still show as lines of water between the streets, and on the map they help read the old city.
Marunouchi and Ginza. East of the palace, Tokyo Station with its sheaf of tracks and, to the south, Ginza, with its almost perfect grid of blocks.
The fabric. Beyond, the blocks of Kanda, Akihabara and Nihonbashi, stitched together by elevated railways and urban expressways snaking over the old canals, and to the east, the Sumida river.
Which scale and paper suit it
1:25,000 on a 30 cm square, as in the picture, covers 7 km around the palace. At that scale Tokyo's density calls for blocks, not single buildings.
1:8,000 on A3 goes down to a neighbourhood: Shibuya and its crossing, Asakusa and the Senso-ji temple, or Shinjuku and its station, the busiest in the world.
The names. The map is labelled with the Spanish or English names stored in OpenStreetMap, in single-stroke lettering.
Make it yours
Open the example and move the frame: Shibuya and Harajuku, with the Meiji shrine, or the bay with Odaiba and its artificial islands deserve a map of their own.
Change all the colours at once with a theme (black ink, sepia, coral, night, blueprint) and download it as PNG. With a free account, also element by element, at 600 dpi, as vector PDF and as SVG.
