Yanaka's Wooden Tokyo

The neighborhood that survived the 1945 firebombing. Between Nippori and Sendagi stations — narrow lanes, wooden houses, family shops that close when the owner feels like it. Yanaka Ginza is a village high street in a thirteen-million-person metropolis. The menchi-katsu at the fried-food stalls costs 200 yen and burns your tongue and you buy another.

SCAI The Bathhouse — contemporary art gallery in a converted 200-year-old sento — shows major Japanese and international artists in a space where the original beams and tile create an atmosphere no white cube can match. Yanaka Cemetery is the quiet heart — shoguns and scholars' graves, feral cats lounging on tombstones with proprietary ease. Spring cherry canopy turns the cemetery paths pink.

Sunset at Yuyake Dandan — the stairway at the top of Yanaka Ginza — catches the evening sky between rooftops while the street below glows with lanterns and the warm greasy scent of croquettes. Tokyo feeling like the small town it was before it decided to become the future.