Cecilie Manz's Tokyo Guide

Cecilie Manz’s relationship with Japan began in childhood, when her parents, both ceramic artists, for a time lived with the family in Arita, a town long associated with porcelain making. At 18, she returned on her own, travelling through the country with little more than a handful of addresses in her pocket. In the years since, work has brought her back regularly. Tokyo, in particular, has become a place of both routine and serendipitous discovery. 

Her visits have developed their own small traditions: going to the same museum even when the exhibition has not changed, frequenting the same coffee shop, pulling a favourite drink from a vending machine (iced green tea). “When you travel, you create traditions for yourself,” she says. “It gives you something to look forward to, a way to enter the place.” Familiarity has not diminished her curiosity. Tokyo, as Manz sees it, is “20 cities in one”: take the train to a station you don’t know, step out and see what happens. 

Her guide moves between these two impulses. There are places she returns to again and again, but also flea markets, workshops, backstreets and ordinary neighbourhoods best experienced without an agenda. What connects them is an attentiveness to ordinary things: how they are made, used, maintained and valued. In Tokyo, Manz finds this as readily in an old bicycle or a carefully tended plant outside someone’s home as she does in a museum collection.

Here, she shares six places – and ways of looking – to return to and get lost in.