In our Perfect Days column, we ask notable Tokyoites to share how they’d spend an ideal day in their home city. 

Lauren Rose Kocher has been living in Tokyo since 2008, working in music and other creative fields. She’s the CEO of Vegas PR Group, and since last year, she’s been running two other businesses inherited from her late husband, Kaito Yamamoto: fashion label Son of the Cheese and grilled cheese diner Buy Me Stand.

Here’s how she’d spend an ideal day in Tokyo:

My perfect day in Tokyo is …

I love eating breakfast with my two small children at home. On the weekends, I flip between cooking elaborate Western breakfasts and Japanese breakfasts. But if I’m being honest, my perfect day would include a babysitter, so that I could head out to an art museum by myself.

My favorite museum in Tokyo is The National Museum of Modern Art. It’s just added a ton of Jean Arp sculpture, and it rotates Nihonga masterpieces on the third floor that always blow my mind, but most impactful of all for me is the War Record Paintings. Modernism includes World War II, and the museum rightly highlights art from this period — which is so unusual because, living in Tokyo, you almost never see visible remembrance of the war. It’s distressing but meaningful, and so difficult to interpret the artists’ intentions. The paintings are dark and dramatic, and I wonder what they really thought.

If not MOMAT on my day off, then I would visit the Nezu Museum in Aoyama for its premodern art, gorgeous lacquerware masterpieces and ancient Chinese pottery. There’s a spacious and hilly Japanese garden connected to the museum with teahouses dotted throughout — a must-see. For lunch, I would eat at the soba restaurant Aoyama Kawakamian.

In the evening, I’d head to a child-friendly restaurant with my children — like Sushino Midori Syun in Yoyogi-Uehara Station. My kids love sushi, and it’s something we can’t make at home.

On this perfect day, if I have another adult helping me with the kids, I would love to end with all of us headed to a bath — onsen are another one of my favorite things about living in Japan. Maenohara Onsen Sayano Yudokoro in Itabashi has the best water in Tokyo. One day, I was there chatting to an older woman, and she asked me if I lived nearby, and I said no, and I asked her if she lived nearby, and she said no. We just stared at each other knowingly. It’s worth the trip.

Tokyo’s best-kept secret is …

There’s this cool activity you can do: riding Mario Karts around Tokyo! Just kidding. I love the Jindaiji area in Chofu. The temple complex, the soba restaurants, the botanical gardens nearby and an amazing onsen, Yumori no Sato. It doesn’t feel like Tokyo.

A place I’ve always wanted to try is …

As I get older, I’m more and more obsessed with ceramics and tableware, so I am hoping to visit Bizen, Mino and Arita soon — areas with a long history of ceramic production.

Follow Lauren on Instagram. 

Updated On November 26, 2025