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. Some stops have a longer second track, Go Deeper, for the part of the story that does not fit between two shops. Walking is not the time for it. Put it on for the train, when there is nothing to look at. About an hour. Start under the big red lantern.

Stand under the red lantern at Kaminarimon. Get out of the flow of people if you can, and look straight up into it. From directly underneath you can see the part of this object that no photograph taken from the front will ever show. A dragon is carved into the wood at the base, coiled, looking down at you. Above it, through the paper, you can make out the ribs of the frame — and where the light is behind it, the seams where the sheets overlap. Those seams are the reason to stop here. The frame is bamboo, grown outside Kyoto. The skin is around three hundred sheets of paper, made in Fukui and pasted onto the frame by hand, one sheet at a time. It hangs there with the weight of a small car, over a crowd, on a gate. And it is not old. The lantern above your head is younger than most of the people standing under it, and it did not come from Asakusa either. The whole thing is taken down and made again — at full size, from scratch, by people in a workshop — roughly every ten years. The most photographed object in Asakusa is neither old nor local. What it is, is handmade. 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. This 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. Every unit on this street is narrow — much narrower than it is deep — and they are all roughly the same width as each other. And there is essentially no shopfront. 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. That 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 the stalls became sheds, the sheds became buildings, and the footprint never changed. The proportions of this street are a rental agreement roughly four hundred years old, rendered in concrete. Now do the same thing with the goods. It takes about three seconds. Pick up anything with a pattern on it and look closely at the edge of the pattern. If it 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 edge is very slightly soft, or slightly uneven, or slightly different from the same item next to it, a person applied it. 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. Carry on up to the temple, then go around the main hall to the right.