Another Tokyo, just past the backstreets.

秋葉原

There is no Akiba shrine in Akihabara. The one the district is named for was moved three kilometres away in 1888, to make room for the railway.

浅草

A temple founded in 628 around a figure two fishermen pulled from the river. The buildings you see around it are all reconstructions.

浅草橋

Neither the gate nor the bridge was ever in Asakusa; both stood on the road that led there. The doll wholesalers have been on this ground for three centuries.

銀座

The silver mint that gave the district its name moved away in 1801. The willows came later, and only because they were the one tree the high water would not kill.

浜松町

Twenty-four minutes to Haneda, twenty-four hours to the islands — the station that faces the sea

原宿

For nearly twenty years, what is now Yoyogi Park was an American housing estate of 827 houses that you could not enter.

蒲田

A shitamachi district that once made films, still working as a gateway to Haneda

亀戸

Kamejima was an island of silt at the river mouth, said to be shaped like a turtle. The channels filled in long ago and the name is the only part left.

錦糸町

The canal the district is named after has been filled in — the one where a voice was said to come out of the water and tell you to leave the fish behind.

北千住

The first post town on the Oshu highway, north of the Arakawa. Basho set out for the north from here, and the drinking alleys off the west exit are still narrow.

目黒

The road drops the moment you leave the station. Everything named Meguro lies at the bottom of the hill

中野

A building that grew out of a two-tsubo bookshop, and the ground that once held a hundred thousand dogs. Both are north of Nakano Station

人形町

Edo kabuki began here. The theatres were moved to Asakusa by the Tempo reforms, and what stayed behind was the name of the souvenir — dolls

西荻窪

A hollow where reeds grew, until the station opened in 1922. The antique shops are not on the main street — they are in the lanes behind it.

押上

Until 2012 the station at the foot of the tower was called Narihira-bashi, after a poet who stopped at this river and asked a bird about the city he had left.

六本木

Six trees, or six households whose names carried the character for tree. Neither account has been proved, and no tree is left to settle it.

両国

Two provinces, joined by a bridge after the fire of 1657. At the centre of the district is a park that exists because of what happened on the ground it covers.

渋谷

A brook from a school song of 1912 still runs under these streets, culverted. The crowd on the crossing is walking on top of it.

新橋

Where Japan's first railway departed. The bars now fill the arches and the alleys, and SL Plaza is where television goes to interview drunk office workers

下北沢

The lower reach of a stream called Kitazawa. The stream is culverted now and survives as a green walkway; Kami-Kitazawa is simply the top of the same water.

品川

Named Shinagawa, addressed in Minato Ward — the old post town is a kilometre from here

新宿

A post town that townsmen paid the shogunate for the right to build, in 1697, because the first stage out of Nihonbashi had been set too far away.

巣鴨

The Jizo at the centre of this district is never shown. By the temple's own account the image was taken from a seal less than three centimetres across.

立石

The town is named after a rock in a children's playground. It is tuff quarried across the bay in Chiba, and only a little of it now shows above the soil.

戸越銀座

The shopping street was paved in 1927 with the stone Ginza tore up after the earthquake, and took the name along with the bricks.

上野

For most of the twentieth century this was where the north of Japan arrived in Tokyo — the overnight trains terminated here and everyone walked straight out.

谷根千

Not on any map. The name is a contraction of three neighbourhoods, coined in 1984 by a quarterly magazine the residents started themselves.