Learn the names of the slopes and you can stop looking at the map. Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi sit across a break in the terrain: a plateau covered in temples on one side, low ground on the other, and a series of stairways and narrow slopes stitching the two together. Walk down Yūyake Dandan from the Yanaka cemetery and you land in a shopping street; keep going in the same direction and you arrive at the shrine in Nezu. The route was decided by the landform long before anyone printed a walking course for it.

Rows of low wooden houses survive here because parts of the area escaped the wartime fires, and old shops and new ones now share those frontages. The Chiyoda and Yamanote lines are close, and wooden rental housing, rare in central Tokyo, still exists, which keeps younger tenants arriving. People call this a temple district, but daily life is the main business of the place: several temple precincts are used as through-routes by residents who are not visiting the temple at all, and nobody appears to mind that they do.

A town with this much vertical relief takes longer to cross than its distances suggest, because the view resets every time you change level. Retracing your steps is not a waste either; a slope going up shows you different things from the same slope going down, so walking the same lane twice does not feel like an error of navigation. That is the quiet advantage of living here, and it is collected daily rather than on special occasions. The landform performs the work that a designed district would have had to pay for.