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. A few stops carry a second, longer track marked Go Deeper. Ignore it today — an hour does not stretch that far. It keeps well, and a train seat is a better place for it. One earphone in, not two. Start at the big red gate with the temple ahead of you.

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 being cut are the ones that need a spare moment to be worth anything. Ahead of you is Kaminarimon, and the crowd is already moving through it in one direction only: from this gate, north, to the temple. It barely moves the other way, and at the wrong hour it does not move at all. That direction is the pattern for the whole hour, so it is worth saying once, plainly. Everything from here on is a decision rather than a description — what to walk past, where to stand instead, which thirty seconds are worth spending and which four minutes are not. Do not fight the crowd, and do not try to cross it. We are going to join it, get through it quickly, and then step off it. Stepping off it is the part almost nobody does. Face the temple and walk. Nakamise, the shopping street, starts immediately, and that is the next stop.

You are on Nakamise-dori now, the shopping street, shops down both sides the whole way to the steps. Keep walking without stopping. That runs against instinct on a street full of shops, but it is about two hundred and fifty metres, and it takes four minutes if you do not stop. Here is why those four minutes are better spent moving than browsing. 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, whatever you buy in the first four minutes of a sixty-minute visit, you carry for the other fifty-six. 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, take about the same time, and are close to empty, because the crowd here is not going anywhere in particular; it is following the shops rather than heading somewhere. Keep going. The steps are ahead of you.