There's a lot to be said about Tokyo and how easy it is to get around on foot and live without a car. It's kind of a surreal dreamscape of unbroken high density urbanity that makes you rethink how large highly functional cities can be.
One of the challenges for seeing it on foot though is how effective the public transit is, especially the underground rail systems. You end up seeing islands around transit stations but not the stretches in between. It's totally worth it sometimes to skip the train and just walk the entire way as there's lots of interesting stuff in the "out of the way" bits of the city.
>It's kind of a surreal dreamscape of unbroken high density urbanity
the funny thing is Tokyo's not even that dense, about a third as dense as Paris or Barcelona, and very sprawlish and suburban (IIRC 75% of the city is suburbs) but transit is indeed excellent and at least they don't inhibit construction to run a housing value racket.
But the suburbs themselves are interesting in tokyo! There are always bars, shops, shrines, gardens, rivers, playgrounds...I've never found that sort of liminal neighbourhood made of rows and rows of identical houses with no one out in the street as I've found in America and Europe.
Yeah, I was getting my Japanese visa and noticed the office wasn't that far from Shinagawa Station, so I decided to walk. Everyone thought it was super-weird I would walk that, where any Tokyo native would take the bus. It was 2km, so, there's a data point on what's considered an excessive walk in Tokyo.
But I'm a person who would take a whole Saturday and spend 8hr walking through San Francisco or Seattle or NYC for fun, so, biased data point.
One of the challenges for seeing it on foot though is how effective the public transit is, especially the underground rail systems. You end up seeing islands around transit stations but not the stretches in between. It's totally worth it sometimes to skip the train and just walk the entire way as there's lots of interesting stuff in the "out of the way" bits of the city.