Welcome. Over the next hour or so we are going to walk the whole of Sensoji — the gates, the shopping street, the pagoda, the main hall, and the quieter ground behind it that most visitors never reach. Two things before we start. Walk at your own pace: the audio waits for you, and each stop plays when you tap it. And put one earphone in rather than two — this is a crowded place and you want to hear the traffic. Stand in front of the big red gate, face the temple, and we will begin.

Before you walk under it, cross to the far side of the road and turn around. You want the whole gate in front of you, not the underside of it. This is also the only place you can take a photograph that has the gate, the lantern and the temple roof in one frame, and almost nobody does it because everyone is queueing directly underneath. What you are looking at: a two-storey gate in vermilion, with a red paper lantern hanging in the centre that is about three and a half metres tall and weighs several hundred kilograms. It is not old. It is rebuilt roughly every ten years by a lantern workshop in Kyoto, using bamboo from Kameoka and paper made from mulberry bark in Fukui, pasted on by hand. The one hanging now is only the latest. In the alcoves on either side stand two figures. On your right as you face the gate is Fujin, the god of wind, carrying a bag of winds over his shoulder. On your left is Raijin, the god of thunder, with a ring of drums arched behind his head. They are why the gate's formal name is Furaijinmon — the gate of the wind and thunder gods. Kaminarimon is the nickname that won. Now the part that changes how this looks. This gate burned down in 1865, and then it simply was not here for ninety-five years. Four generations of people came to this temple and walked into an empty space. What you are standing in front of was rebuilt in 1960, and it was paid for by one man: the founder of the company now called Panasonic. He had come here to pray during a serious illness, recovered, and paid for the gate. So walk under it now, and look straight up at the base of the lantern. Two things are there. His company's name is written on it, which is the receipt for a private promise kept in public. And carved into the wood underneath is a dragon, coiled and looking down at you — invisible from every photograph taken from the front. Before you leave, walk through and turn around to look at the back of the gate. There are two more statues here, in the same alcoves seen from the other side, and they are almost never photographed because everyone has already turned to face the temple. They are dragon deities — a golden dragon and a heavenly dragon — and they were added in 1978, more than three centuries after the wind and thunder gods became famous. The gate has a front that everyone knows and a back that almost nobody has looked at. One more piece of the history. A gate has stood on this line since the tenth century, but not here. The original was several hundred metres south, and it was moved to this position in the 1630s when the temple grounds were reorganised. So the gate is old as an institution and new as an object, which is the pattern for almost everything you will see today. One last thing. Once a year, for the Sanja festival in May, this lantern is folded up like a concertina and lifted out of the way, because the portable shrines are too tall to pass under it. The most photographed object in Asakusa spends that weekend collapsed in the ceiling. When you are ready, face the temple and start walking. The shopping street ahead is the next stop.

You are now on Nakamise-dori. It runs about 250 metres straight to the next gate, with roughly ninety shops down both sides. Walk slowly for a moment and look at the shape of the street rather than the goods. Notice how narrow each shop is, and how the merchandise comes right out to the line of the street. These are stalls that hardened into buildings. In the late 1600s the people living around here were given permission to trade on the temple's approach in exchange for cleaning and maintaining the grounds. That is the deal that created this street: commerce as the price of upkeep. The shape you are standing in is a four-hundred-year-old rental agreement. The buildings themselves are much newer, and the reason is grim. The street was rebuilt in brick in 1885, and the brick version was destroyed in the earthquake of 1923. What you see now is concrete, put up in 1925 and repaired again after the war. Almost nothing in Asakusa is as old as it looks. Three things are worth stopping for, and they are all food. Ningyo-yaki are small sponge cakes filled with sweet bean paste, baked in moulds shaped like the landmarks around you — look for the pagoda and the lantern among them. Age-manju are deep-fried bean-paste buns, and they are only good for about a minute after they leave the fryer, so buy one and eat it there. Kaminari-okoshi is a hard puffed-rice sweet named after the gate you just walked through; it keeps for weeks, which is exactly why it became the souvenir everyone takes home. Now a piece of etiquette that will make you stand out less. Eating while walking is discouraged here, and it is not a rule invented for tourists — it is how a crowded shopping street stays clean without bins. Most shops keep a small space beside the counter where you are expected to stand, finish, and hand the wrapper back. One thing has changed recently that is worth knowing while you look at the shops. For most of the modern era the land under this street was held by the metropolitan government, and the rents were low. Ownership returned to the temple, and in 2018 the rents were raised sharply — by a multiple, not a percentage. Several long-standing shops closed. What replaced them tends to sell to visitors rather than to the neighbourhood, which is why the mix here feels more like a souvenir street than it did twenty years ago. That is not a scandal, it is arithmetic, but it explains what you are looking at. Look up before you move on. The shutters have paintings on them, running the length of the street. When the shops close at night the whole approach becomes a single continuous picture, which is a completely different reason to come back after dark. If the crowd is heavy, the side streets to your left and right run parallel and are almost empty. You lose the shops but you keep your pace, and you rejoin at the same gate.