One street back from the main avenue, the volume drops. Omotesandō is a wide, gently sloping avenue lined with zelkova trees, and it exists because it was laid out as the approach to Meiji Shrine: its width and its gradient were settled for people on foot, long before anyone thought of it as a place to shop. Flagship stores and contemporary architecture now stand along both sides, several of them by architects whose names are known well outside Japan, within a few hundred metres of one another.

Turn off it and the road narrows to perhaps a third of the width. Small independent shops occupy low wooden buildings in the same city block as the flagships, paying rents that are high even by Tokyo standards, which is why the back lanes change hands quickly and why you can return after a year and find a different shop behind the same door. The two scales are not in competition. The large stores gather the crowd and the lanes take the overflow, and each depends on the other in order to work at all.

It looks like a district made entirely of new buildings, but the line of the street is a century old. The spacing of the trees and the direction of the slope were fixed when this was a shrine approach, and everything since has been laid on top of that geometry without altering it. That is the part visitors rarely register: this is not a shopping street that acquired trees, it is a formal approach that acquired shops. The sense that Harajuku changes constantly rests on one thing underneath it that does not change at all.