Asakusa: the District That Burned Twice and Opened Again on Monday

Stop in front of the giant red lantern. It weighs about seven hundred kilos and is the most photographed sight in Tokyo. You are at Kaminarimon, the thunder gate. Look to either side. On the right is Fujin, the wind god, with a bag of air over his shoulders. On the left, Raijin, the thunder god, surrounded by drums. The gate guards the entrance to the oldest temple in Tokyo. But the one you see is not old. The original burned in 1865, and for almost a century there was no gate. In 1960 it was rebuilt with the money of Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic. He had prayed here during …

You are on Nakamise-dori, about two hundred and fifty metres of stalls between the gate and the temple. Smell the air: freshly toasted rice crackers, red bean sweets, chestnuts. In the early eighteenth century the temple allowed local people to open stalls here in exchange for sweeping and maintaining the path. It is one of the oldest shopping streets in the country. Pilgrims who came to Senso-ji from all over Japan went home with souvenirs of Edo. This was, in its day, a giant souvenir shop. Look out for ningyo-yaki: filled sponge cakes shaped like lanterns, doves or the thunder god. They …

You are at Hozomon, the treasure gate. Walk through it and turn around: hanging on the back are two giant straw sandals, more than four metres long. They are handmade in the city of Murayama, in northern Japan, and replaced every few years. The idea is simple: demons who see these sandals will think a giant lives inside and will not dare to enter. Above the gate, on the upper floor, the temple's sutras and treasures are kept. Hence the name. This gate is new too. The previous one burned in the bombing of 10 March 1945. The current one, in concrete, dates from 1964, paid for by a hotel busin…

In front of the main hall stands a large bronze incense burner. Do as the others do: lean in and waft the smoke with your hands towards your head or wherever it hurts. It is said to heal. Senso-ji is the oldest temple in Tokyo. According to tradition, in the year 628 two fishermen brothers pulled a small golden statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, out of the Sumida River. They threw it back several times and it always returned to their nets. So the village chief kept it in his house, which became a temple. That statue is still here, according to the temple. But nobody sees it. It is a se…

Look up: five stacked roofs, each a little smaller than the one below. This pagoda is about fifty-three metres tall. The original dated from the seventeenth century. It survived the 1923 earthquake, but not 1945. The one you see was rebuilt in 1973. There is something curious about Japanese pagodas. For centuries, many wooden ones withstood earthquakes that brought down stone buildings. The secret is inside: a central pillar that hangs almost free and floors that are not rigidly joined to each other. When the ground moves, each floor sways in the opposite direction to the one above, like a …

This Shinto shrine, next to the great Buddhist temple, is smaller and more modest. And it is much older than it looks. It was commissioned in 1649 by the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu. It survived the 1923 earthquake. It survived the 1945 bombs. It is one of the few buildings in the district that knew Edo. It is dedicated to the three men of the legend: the two fishermen who found the statue and the village chief who kept it. Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine, side by side, telling the same story. For centuries in Japan, Buddhism and Shinto mixed without difficulty. In 1868 the Meiji government o…

You are on Hoppy Street. Red lanterns, plastic tables on the pavement, the smell of stew. People have been eating and drinking here in full view since the postwar years. The name comes from a drink: Hoppy. It appeared in 1948, when beer was a luxury. It is a beer-flavoured drink with very little alcohol, mixed with shochu, a cheap spirit. The result tasted like beer and got you drunk like beer, at a fraction of the price. For the workers of a Tokyo reduced to ashes, it was the beer they could afford. Order nikomi, the street's signature dish: beef tendons slow-cooked for hours in miso broth…

You are in Rokku, the sixth district. Today there are pachinko parlours, a comedy theatre and a few old cinemas. A hundred years ago, this was Japan's Broadway. In 1903 the Denkikan opened here, the country's first permanent cinema. Then came dozens of picture houses, revue theatres and the Asakusa Opera, which mixed European arias with local jokes. A few blocks away stood the Ryounkaku, the tower that rises above the clouds. Built in 1890 of brick, it had twelve storeys and Japan's first electric lift. From the top you could see Mount Fuji. On 1 September 1923, at 11:58, the Great Kanto ea…

Look up, above the corner building: a giant chef's head in a white hat is watching you. You are in Kappabashi, the street of kitchen utensils. It is about eight hundred metres long with more than a hundred and fifty shops. Knives, pots, red lanterns, uniforms, bowls. If a Tokyo restaurant needs something, it buys it here. And the strangest speciality: plastic food. Sampuru, the replica dishes you see in the windows of Japanese restaurants, are sold in these shops. They appeared in the twenties, first in wax. They let customers know what they would get. Today they are almost an art form: spa…

You are on Azumabashi, the red bridge. Look across the river: a golden building like a glass of beer and, next to it, a huge golden flame. It is the headquarters of the Asahi brewery. The flame was designed by the Frenchman Philippe Starck in 1989. It represents the burning spirit of the company. Tokyo locals gave it a far less elegant nickname, to do with its shape. Behind it rises the Skytree, the tallest tower in Japan, at 634 metres. The number is no accident: in old Japanese, six, three and four can be read as Musashi, the name of the old province where Edo stood. Now look at the water…

You are in Sumida Park. In spring these cherry trees are covered in blossom and thousands of people picnic beneath them. It is one of the happiest images of Tokyo. The first cherry trees on this bank were planted on the orders of the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune around 1717. He had a practical aim: to attract crowds whose footsteps would pack down and strengthen the embankment against floods. But this park holds another memory. On the night of 9 to 10 March 1945, more than three hundred B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs on eastern Tokyo. The wind turned the fires into a firestorm. Thousand…

You are on Sakurabashi, the bridge that crosses the river in the shape of an X. It is for pedestrians only, and from the middle you get one of the best views of the Skytree. Count up what you have seen. A gate from 1960. A temple from 1958. A pagoda from 1973. A shopping street rebuilt twice. A shrine from 1649 that survived everything. Almost nothing in Asakusa is old, and yet everything feels old. That is the Japanese way of understanding permanence: preserving not the material, but the place, the form and the use. The shrine at Ise, the most sacred in Japan, has been demolished and rebui…