Tokyo, beyond the first visit

Yanaka doesn't have its own WMJS guide yet, so I'll lay the walk out here directly. Most of Tokyo was rebuilt at least once this century, first after the 1923 earthquake and again after the wartime firebombing, but this hillside stretch north of Ueno happened to miss both. The wooden row houses, the temple town, the narrow lanes that don't run straight for more than a block, none of it is a recreation. I'd give the day to the cemetery's own pace, quiet and unhurried.

Like Yanaka, Kagurazaka doesn't have its own WMJS guide yet. It was one of Tokyo's hanamachi, the geisha districts, and the stone-paved alleys off the main slope still carry that layout: narrow, deliberately hard to walk in a straight line, the sort of layout built to slow a footstep before a teahouse door. What sits inside those alleys now is French as often as it's Japanese, the legacy of a language institute and bookshop that drew a French community here decades ago. I'd spend the day on foot, starting at the shrine and letting the alleys decide the rest.

Neither Kuramae nor Kiyosumi-Shirakawa has its own WMJS guide yet, but they share one subway line and one history worth knowing before you go: this stretch east of the centre once held the shogunate's rice warehouses and, later, the workshops of the craftsmen who supplied Edo with hats, shoes, leather goods and toys. Many of those workshops are still standing, just doing different work now. I'd treat the day as one continuous drift south along the Sumida River, powered by a single train line.

Shimokitazawa doesn't have its own WMJS guide yet, though it's on the list. What it has instead, right now, is density: hundreds of secondhand and vintage shops packed into an area you can walk end to end in a matter of minutes, plus small theatres and live houses tucked behind unmarked doors on nearly every block. A Japanese walking-culture magazine described the local logic of the place: step into a shop you wouldn't normally enter and there's a real chance you leave having found something, a record, a band, a play, you didn't know you were looking for.

Shibuya and Shinjuku already have their own WMJS guides, and if this is your first Tokyo trip you'll likely have covered the scramble crossing, Hachiko and Kabukicho's neon already. On a return trip I'd give both places more room: a slower morning, a proper walk through Shinjuku Gyoen, one bar for the whole evening instead of a crawl through five.