This walk is about how things here are made, and about learning to tell in a few seconds whether something in front of you was made by a person or printed by a machine. A warning about timing: the museum at stop four is open from ten until six, and craftspeople usually work there at weekends. Many of the shops at stop five close on Sundays. If either matters to you, check the day before you set out. About an hour. Start under the big red lantern.

Stand under the red lantern at Kaminarimon, get yourself out of the flow of people if you can, and look straight up into it. From directly underneath you are seeing the part of this object that no photograph taken from the front will ever show. There is a dragon carved into the wood at the base, coiled, looking down at you. There is also a name written on it, and we will come back to that. The numbers first, because they are worth carrying. It is about three point nine metres tall, three point three metres across, and it weighs roughly seven hundred kilograms. That is the weight of a small car, hanging over a crowd, on a gate. Now what it is made of. The frame is bamboo, grown in Kameoka, just outside Kyoto. The skin is around three hundred sheets of paper made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry, produced in Fukui and pasted onto the frame by hand, sheet by sheet. Look up into the inside of it. You can see the ribs of the frame through the paper, and with the light behind it you can make out the seams where the sheets overlap. A workshop in Kyoto has been making this lantern since 1971, and the whole thing is replaced roughly every ten years. Stay with that for a second, because it is the argument this entire walk is going to make. The single most photographed object in Asakusa is not from Asakusa. It is also not old — the one hanging over your head is younger than most of the people standing under it. What it is, is handmade. Completely, at full size, from scratch, by people in a workshop, over and over, on a ten-year cycle that has been running for more than fifty years. Old and handmade are different questions. Almost everything you walk past in the next hour will answer one of them and be sold to you on the other. One more thing while you are under here. Walk through and turn around, and look at the lantern from the back. The side facing the street says Kaminarimon, thunder gate — which is the nickname. The side facing the temple says Furaijinmon, the gate of the wind and thunder gods, which is the actual name. The object carries its formal name on the face almost nobody reads, and its nickname on the face everybody photographs. Somebody made that decision. And the name on the base: this gate burned down in the nineteenth century and then simply was not here for ninety-five years. It exists because one man paid for it in 1960 — the founder of the company now called Panasonic, who had come here to pray during a serious illness and recovered. His company's name is on the lantern. So every ten years, a workshop in Kyoto rebuilds a private thank-you note at full size and hangs it over the busiest gate in Tokyo. That is the last object today that will tell you what it is. Walk under the gate into the shopping street, and stop looking at the merchandise.

Walk into Nakamise, and stop looking at the goods. Look at the shops instead. This takes about thirty seconds and it will change what you see for the rest of the day. First, the width. Every unit on this street is narrow — much narrower than it is deep — and they are all roughly the same width as each other. Second, the front. There is essentially no shopfront at all. The merchandise comes straight out to the line of the street, and the shutter, when it comes down, is the whole face of the building. What you are looking at is a row of stalls that hardened into architecture. The traders here were originally granted the right to sell on the temple's approach in exchange for taking on cleaning duties at the temple itself. The right was heritable. The plot was a stall's worth of ground and it stayed a stall's worth of ground, so as the stalls became sheds and the sheds became buildings, the footprint never changed. The proportions of this street are a rental agreement roughly four hundred years old, rendered in concrete. And it is concrete, which is the other thing worth noticing. This street burned in 1923 with the rest of eastern Tokyo, and it was rebuilt in reinforced concrete rather than timber. What looks like the oldest shopping street in Japan is a fireproof reconstruction wearing wooden colours. Now the thing almost every visitor misses, because it is only visible when the street is shut. Those shutters are painted. When the shops close, the whole length of Nakamise becomes a continuous painted scene, and the street reads as one object instead of ninety. If you are still in Asakusa early in the morning or late in the evening, come back and walk it closed. It is a completely different street, and it is free. Now the three-second test I promised, and you can run it on the nearest stall right now. Pick up anything with a pattern on it. If the pattern sits on top of the surface, with a hard edge that is perfectly even all the way round, it was printed. If the colour has gone into the material, and the edges are very slightly soft, or slightly uneven, or slightly different from the same item next to it, then a person applied it. There is a second version of the test that works on any cloth, and it takes one second. Turn the piece over and look at the back. If the pattern is there on the reverse too, roughly as strong as it is on the front, the colour went through the fibre and it was dyed. If the back is blank, or much paler, the pattern was laid onto the surface and it was printed. Cloth cannot hide this from you. Neither answer is wrong. A printed cloth is a perfectly good souvenir and nobody is being defrauded. But the price ought to tell you which of the two you are holding, and on this street it frequently does not. That gap is what the rest of this walk is about closing. Carry on up to the temple, then go around the main hall to the right.