Tokyo: incense at dawn, neon at midnight

Tokyo does not have one centre — it has dozens, and each behaves like its own city. Mornings belong to **Senso-ji** in Asakusa, where visitors fan the smoke of the great incense burner over their shoulders before stepping through the temple doors, and Nakamise-dori sells warm ningyo-yaki to the first arrivals of the day. An hour later you can be in **Shibuya**, watching the scramble crossing empty and refill in ninety-second waves, or up in Shinjuku's Golden Gai, where the bars seat six people and stay open until the first trains run again. The food alone is reason to come. The Tsukiji Outer Market still grills tamagoyaki on skewers and shucks oysters at eight in the morning, while the tuna auctions have moved on to Toyosu. In *Omoide Yokocho* the yakitori smoke goes straight into the alley, and around Ginza the sushi counters serve a dozen pieces in near silence. Ramen changes by neighbourhood — the light shoyu of the old shitamachi, the thick tsukemen dips of Ikebukuro — and a convenience-store onigiri at midnight is genuinely good. Between the noise there is quiet. The forest of **Meiji Jingu** swallows the traffic of Harajuku within a hundred metres of the torii; the moat-side paths of the Imperial Palace turn pink for ten days at the start of April and gold in the ginkgo weeks of late November. *Yanaka* keeps its wooden houses, its cemetery cats and a pre-war shopping street, and the stone slopes of Kagurazaka still hide ryotei behind sliding doors. Come with an appetite, a rail pass and no fixed plan for the afternoons.