You have an hour. This walk is built for exactly that, and it is as much about what to skip as what to see. Five stops, about fifty minutes at a normal pace, ending at the river next to the station. If you have less than forty minutes, do the first two and the last one. One earphone in, not two. Start at the big red gate with the temple ahead of you.

Before anything else, two things. Put the big red gate behind your left shoulder, and check the time. This walk takes about fifty minutes at a normal pace, and most of that is walking rather than standing. If you have less than forty minutes, do stops one, two and five and skip the middle two. That is not a degraded version — those three hold together on their own, and the two I am cutting are the ones that need a spare moment to be worth anything. Now, the gate. It is Kaminarimon, and you will want a photograph of it. Take it from the far side of the road rather than from underneath. From over there you get the gate, the lantern and the temple roof in a single frame. From underneath you get the bottom of a lantern, in a queue, in the same photograph several thousand other people took today. That is the pattern for the whole hour, so let me say it plainly once. Everything I am going to tell you is a decision, not a description. What to walk past. Where to stand instead. Which thirty seconds are worth spending and which four minutes are not. If you want the full explanation of what you are looking at, there is a longer walk that spends an hour on the temple alone. This one assumes you do not have that hour. One practical thing that shapes everything else. The crowd here moves in one direction: from this gate, north, to the temple. It barely moves the other way, and at the wrong hour it does not stop at all. Do not fight it and do not try to cross it. We are going to join it, get through it quickly, and then step off it — and stepping off it is the part almost nobody does. One more thing that is worth knowing even though you cannot act on it today. The density here is almost entirely a function of the clock, not the season. Before about nine in the morning and after about five in the afternoon, this same route is a different walk — same buildings, a third of the people. If you ever come back to Asakusa with a choice about timing, that is the single highest-value decision available to you, and it costs nothing. Face the temple and walk.

You are on Nakamise now, the shopping street, and my advice here is unpopular: keep walking. It is about two hundred and fifty metres and it takes four minutes if you do not stop. Here is why I am telling you to spend those four minutes moving. The shops are real and several are genuinely good, but you cannot evaluate anything at this density. You are in a moving queue, you cannot step back to compare, and you cannot leave and return without walking the whole street twice. Every shopping decision made here is made under pressure, and it will not be your best one. On top of that, anything you buy in the first four minutes of a sixty-minute visit, you carry for the other fifty-six. So: walk. But two things are worth your eyes while you move. First, glance up at the shutters where any shop happens to be closed. They are painted, and at night, when every shop has shut, the whole street becomes one continuous picture about two hundred and fifty metres long. You are not seeing it now. It is the single best argument for coming back after dark, and it costs nothing. Second, about two-thirds of the way up, the smell changes. That is rice crackers being grilled over charcoal. If you buy exactly one thing on this street, buy one of those — you can eat it while walking, it is finished before the next stop, and it does not become luggage. And one escape route, which is the most useful thing on this stop. If the crowd is bad enough that you are not moving — and at the wrong hour it genuinely stops — do not stand in it. There are parallel streets running the same direction, one block to either side of this one. They lead to the same place, they take about the same time, and they are close to empty, because the crowd here is not going anywhere in particular; it is following the shops. You lose the shutters and the smell. You gain being able to walk. On a tight hour, in bad weather, or with a suitcase, that is the right trade and you should take it without feeling like you missed something. Keep going. The steps are ahead of you.