Senso-ji

The temple's own account is specific. In 628, two brothers fishing the Sumida netted a small statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. They returned it to the water; it came back to their net. The village headman recognised what he was looking at, converted his house into a temple, and devoted his life to it.

The statue is a hibutsu — a hidden Buddha. It has never been displayed. There is no photograph. Whether anything is in the box is, formally, not a question that gets asked.

The gate, the lantern, and who paid for them

Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate, is the most photographed structure in Tokyo. The current one is not old: the gate burned in 1865 and stood as a gap for nearly a century. It was rebuilt in 1960, paid for by Matsushita Konosuke — the founder of what is now Panasonic — in thanks for recovery from illness after praying here.

The lantern beneath it is about four metres tall and weighs around 700 kilograms. It is replaced roughly every decade. Stand underneath and look up: there is a dragon carved into the base, and almost nobody photographing the front ever sees it.

Behind the gate, Nakamise-dori runs about 250 metres to the temple with around ninety stalls. It is one of the oldest shopping streets in Japan — local families were granted the right to trade here in the late 1600s in exchange for cleaning the temple grounds, and some of the shops are still held by descendants of those families.

The main hall you are looking at was finished in 1958. The one it replaced was destroyed on 10 March 1945, along with most of the neighbourhood.

What Asakusa was

For most of the Edo period Asakusa was Tokyo's pleasure district — theatres, storytellers, archery galleries, and the road to Yoshiwara. In the early twentieth century the Rokku quarter held the country's first cinemas and its music halls. Then it burned in 1945 and never quite got its status back; the entertainment moved west to Shinjuku and Shibuya.

What was left behind is a district that still feels like the low city — old sweet shops, tempura counters that have been in one family for generations, and rickshaw pullers who are genuinely good guides.

How to visit it without hating it

Nakamise at midday is a slow-moving crush. Come before nine or after five. The main hall closes at five, but the buildings are lit up in the evening, and both hall and gate look considerably better without four thousand people in front of them.

On the third weekend of May the Sanja Matsuri takes over the whole district — around a hundred portable shrines carried by neighbourhood teams, and well over a million people across three days. It is one of Tokyo's three great festivals and it is not a spectator event so much as a crowd you join.