Yanaka is the part of Tokyo that did not burn, did not flood, and did not get demolished for the bubble economy's office towers, and what remains is a neighbourhood of wooden houses, small temples, and a street of independent shops that has been operating in the same format since the 1920s. The Yanaka Cemetery, which occupies a long strip between the residential blocks, is where the neighbourhood goes to walk, to sit under cherry trees in spring, and to visit graves. It is one of the least tourist-facing spaces in central Tokyo and one of the most pleasant.
The Yanesen area includes Yanaka, Nezu, and Sendagi, three adjacent neighbourhoods that merge into each other along a network of narrow lanes. There are small shrines on every other corner. There are shotengai, the old covered shopping streets, that sell everyday goods rather than souvenirs. There are cats on every other wall. It is the Tokyo that existed before Tokyo became the subject of photography.
The craft workshops on the back lanes are still functioning. The pottery and lacquerware and paper goods being made in these streets are made by people who learnt the craft from the generation that built the neighbourhood. They are not performing tradition for visitors; they are doing the work.
People who want to understand Tokyo as a city with a long history rather than only as a design and technology capital. Architecture people who want to see how the wooden residential blocks actually looked before concrete replaced them. Anyone who wants to spend a full day walking slowly through a neighbourhood where the pace is determined by the neighbourhood rather than by a schedule. Visitors on longer trips who have done the famous Tokyo and want to go somewhere that does not appear in every itinerary.
Not the right area for travellers on a short trip who need to see the major sites. Yanaka is a slow neighbourhood and its pleasures are proportional to the time spent in it.
Yanaka Ginza, the shotengai that runs downhill from the cemetery, for the shops and the people using them. The Yanaka Cemetery on a morning in any season, but specifically at cherry blossom time when the paths under the trees are extraordinary. Scai The Bathhouse on Yanesen's eastern edge: a contemporary art gallery installed in a 200-year-old public bathhouse, which is specific to Tokyo in a way that nothing else quite is. The craft shops on Yanaka's back lanes for pottery, woodwork, and paper goods made in the neighbourhood. Neko no Mise, the cluster of cat-themed ceramicists and illustrators that the neighbourhood has quietly accumulated. Walk with no particular destination; the neighbourhood rewards this more than anywhere else in the city.