Yanaka is one of the few central-Tokyo neighborhoods that didn’t burn in 1923 or 1945, which means the street pattern is still Edo-period and the building stock is largely prewar wood and tile. The houses are low — two stories — and the lanes between them are narrow enough that the eaves on either side reduce the sky to a strip. The neighborhood is also dense with Buddhist temples; there are about seventy in a square kilometer, refugees from a sixteenth-century reorganization that pushed temples out of the shogunal core to its northern edge. Each temple compound has a courtyard, often planted with old ginkgo or zelkova, and most leave their gates open during the day. The result, walking Yanaka in midsummer, is that the small lanes carry building shade and the temple compounds bridge them with canopy. You move from one to the other.
The picks below trace that. The premise is a slow walk at late-morning pace, the kind you’d take after coffee on Yanaka Ginza. A practical note: some of the temple gates close at lunchtime for the monks’ rest period, generally noon to two. The route below clears them by 11:30 or picks them up after 2.