Senso-ji

Come at six and you walk through Kaminarimon – the Thunder Gate, with the four-metre lantern – with nobody standing under it taking a photograph. Nakamise is a long empty lane of shuttered fronts, which is when you can actually see that the shutters are painted, and that the street is straight and narrow in the way an Edo approach road was meant to be. At the top, the incense cauldron is lit and the hall is open and there are people at it who are not tourists.

By half past nine the shutters go up and the lane fills. By eleven the queue to photograph Kaminarimon reaches back to the road. Nothing has gone wrong; this is simply what a free site with no admission gate and no capacity control looks like in the middle of the day. If your schedule only allows the middle of the day, use the side approaches: Dempo-in Street runs east-west across Nakamise and is a quarter as busy, and the western gate off Kaminarimon-dori brings you into the precinct without the corridor at all.

The other honest option is the evening. The buildings are floodlit after dark, the main hall is closed but the grounds are not, and the five-storey pagoda against a black sky is the picture most people are trying and failing to take at noon.

Directly opposite Kaminarimon, across the road, is the Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center – the stacked timber-fronted building by Kengo Kuma. It is a tourist office, so people walk past it. On the eighth floor there is a free observation terrace, open late into the evening, with the one view of Asakusa that makes the place legible: Nakamise running north as a straight line of roofs, Senso-ji at the end of it, and Tokyo Skytree behind on the far bank of the Sumida.

There is no ticket and no lift queue worth speaking of. It is the best free view in eastern Tokyo and it is forty seconds from the gate. If you are weighing Skytree at ¥2,100 and upwards, look from here first – not as a substitute, but so you know what you are paying for.

The ground floor of the same building is a genuine information desk with English-speaking staff, free wi-fi, and toilets that are not the ones behind the temple.

Almost nothing you see is old. Senso-ji was founded in 628 and burned in the firebombing of March 1945; the main hall, the pagoda and Kaminarimon are post-war reconstructions in reinforced concrete. Knowing that changes what is worth your attention, because it moves the interest from the fabric to the practice.

Watch the omikuji drawers to the right of the hall. You shake a metal cylinder, read the numbered stick, take the paper from the matching drawer, and if it is kyo – bad fortune – you tie it to the rack and leave it behind. Senso-ji is well known among Japanese visitors for handing out a high proportion of bad fortunes, and it does not soften them. It is a hundred yen and it is the most-used thing on the site.

Then walk east, past the pagoda, to Asakusa-jinja – the shrine in the same precinct, which survived the war intact. It is a 1649 building, it is quiet, and it is the one genuinely seventeenth-century thing you can stand in front of here. It is also the shrine that runs Sanja Matsuri in May.

Full context on the neighbourhood, including where to eat before the crowds, is on the Asakusa district page.