This one goes north, out of the tourist district and into the part of Asakusa where people live. That changes how you should behave. These are working streets and private homes. Photograph buildings, not people's windows, and keep your voice down — the audio is in your ear, not theirs. Several stops hold a longer track called Go Deeper. Keep it for later: lingering outside a private house is exactly what these streets do not need. The train back is the right place for it. About an hour, eight stops, flat the whole way. Start behind the temple, at the smallest amusement park you will ever see.

Two streets behind the temple, wedged in between houses, is the smallest amusement park you will ever see. Stand outside the entrance, on the street, and look up over the fence before deciding whether to go in. What you can see from here is most of it. The whole park sits on a plot smaller than a supermarket — a tower, some track, a couple of rides, and then, on every side, apartment buildings with laundry on the balconies. Someone's bedroom window looks directly onto a roller coaster. That coaster is the thing to watch. It runs between the apartment buildings, threads through a gap in a wall, and at one point crosses the roof of a neighbouring building. Nobody would be permitted to build that today, anywhere. It is simply older than the rules that would stop it. Look at how the park handles having no room, because it is the most interesting thing about it. There is no space to spread out, so everything went up and inward: rides stacked over other rides, track threaded through gaps, walkways running under structures. Nothing here is laid out. Everything is fitted in, the way you pack a suitcase that is already full. You do not have to go inside, and this walk does not depend on it. But notice what the scale is telling you, because it sets up everything else you will see this afternoon: nothing up here was placed for visitors. It was placed for the people who were already living here, and it is still standing because they still are. Walk north from here. Within about three minutes the crowd will simply stop, and you will notice the moment it happens.

You are on Senzoku-dori now. Stop for a moment, and notice what changed. The volume dropped. There is no queue anywhere. Nobody is standing in the street taking a photograph, and nobody is trying to sell you anything. You are about six hundred metres from the busiest shopping street in Tokyo. Look at what is actually for sale. Fish. Vegetables. Futons. School uniforms. Reading glasses. A shop that repairs watches. None of it works as a souvenir, because none of it is meant to be one. This is what a neighbourhood actually buys, day to day. Look up. Count how many of these shops have a home on the floor above. Most of them do. The shopkeeper lives over the shop, which means the rent does not have to be earned before anything else, and it means somebody is here at night. That single arrangement — living over the work — is most of the reason this street still functions when so many others did not. Nobody here is expecting you, and that is genuinely the point, so do not treat the street as a display. Photograph the shopfronts if you like. Do not photograph through a doorway at somebody having their tea. If you want to do the single most useful thing a visitor can do in a place like this, buy something small. A shotengai stays open on daily turnover, and for about two hundred yen you are a customer like anybody else. Keep going north to the shrine.