Yanaka old-town walk

Leave Nippori by the west exit and climb the slope into Yanaka Cemetery. Ten hectares of graves under cherry trees, with a central avenue called Sakura-dori that is one of the least crowded blossom walks in Tokyo in early April. Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, is buried here. Walk it slowly; people commute through it and it functions as a park.

Come out on the west side into the temple lanes. There are around seventy temples in roughly a square kilometre here and the ones worth stopping at are unmarked. Take turnings that look too narrow. You will pass wooden houses with plant pots stacked three deep against the walls, a former bathhouse converted into a gallery, and a considerable number of cats.

Work generally west and south and you will arrive at Yuyake Dandan, the ‘sunset steps’, looking down the length of Yanaka Ginza: 170 metres of about seventy small shops, almost none of them chains. Eat here – menchi-katsu, croquettes, senbei grilled to order – standing near the shop you bought from, which is the local etiquette.

From the bottom of the steps, head south-west through Sendagi. This is the quietest part of the walk: second-hand bookshops, small coffee roasters, and the kind of residential Tokyo that visitors otherwise never see. There is nothing to tick off here and that is the point.

Continue south to Nezu-jinja. This is the one genuinely major building on the route: a shrine complex completed in 1706 that came through the war intact, with its main hall, gate and corridor all original. Behind it a slope is covered in a tunnel of small red torii, which is a miniature of the famous Kyoto version with none of the queue.

The azalea garden on that slope holds several thousand plants of a hundred or so varieties and is spectacular for a few weeks in April, when it is ticketed and busy. The rest of the year the shrine is free and almost empty, which is its own argument.

From Nezu you have a choice. Stop here – Nezu station on the Chiyoda Line is two minutes away and this is a natural end if you are tired.

Or walk twenty minutes south-east into Ueno Park and finish at the Tokyo National Museum, which is ¥1,000, closed on Mondays, free for under-18s and over-70s, and open until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays. That last detail makes a late-afternoon finish work: walk in the morning, eat in Yanaka, and use the evening opening rather than fighting the daytime crowds.

A note on the pace. This walk does not work as a march between waypoints. Its entire value is in the turnings you take for no reason, and three hours is a realistic figure only if you allow for getting mildly lost. Nothing in Yanaka is more than fifteen minutes from a station, so being lost is not a risk.

If you want to stay in this part of the city, Nippori is on the Yamanote Line and is the Keisei Skyliner terminus, which puts Narita about thirty-six minutes away.