Yanaka

Come out of Nippori station’s west exit and you are at the edge of Yanaka Cemetery, ten hectares of graves under a canopy of cherry trees. It is a public park in everything but name, with a central avenue known as Sakura-dori that is one of the best and least crowded blossom walks in Tokyo in early April.

Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, is buried here, and so is much of Meiji Tokyo’s professional class. The point is not the graves but the atmosphere: cats, cicadas in summer, people walking to work through it, and complete quiet ten minutes from the Yamanote Line.

West from the cemetery the lanes begin. This is the part to do without a map. Walk slowly, take turnings that look too small, and you will pass wooden houses with pot plants stacked three deep against the wall, a wood-fired bathhouse converted into a gallery, tiny temples with no signage in any language, and about four cats per block. The Yanaka old-town walk sets out a route for anyone who would rather not improvise.

Yanaka Ginza is a 170-metre shopping street of about seventy small shops, almost none of them chains: a butcher, a fishmonger, senbei grilled to order, croquettes fried in front of you, a shop selling only cat-shaped things because of the neighbourhood’s cat population. It is a functioning local high street that happens to be photogenic, rather than a restored one.

At its eastern end are the stairs known as Yuyake Dandan, sunset steps, which look down the length of the street. That is the view on every article about Yanaka and it is best about an hour before sunset. Note that the shops will be closing at roughly the same time, so the photograph and the shopping are not quite compatible.

Eat as you walk here, standing near the shop you bought from. Menchi-katsu, croquettes, grilled senbei, ice cream. Two thousand yen is a full lunch for two.

Yanaka is the Y of Yanesen, the local name for Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi together. Nezu-jinja, fifteen minutes south-west, is a genuine 1706 shrine complex that survived the war, with a tunnel of small red torii up the slope behind it and an azalea garden that is spectacular and ticketed for a few weeks in April. Sendagi to the north has the coffee shops and the second-hand bookshops.

South from there it is a twenty-minute walk into Ueno Park and the Tokyo National Museum, which is the natural pairing: two hours of the best collection of Japanese art in the world, then an afternoon in the streets the city it came from actually looked like.

Yanaka is also a serious option for where to stay. It is quiet, it is on the Yamanote Line at Nippori, and Nippori is the Skyliner terminus, which puts Narita airport thirty-six minutes away – a better arrival and departure than almost anywhere in central Tokyo.