Greater Tokyo, with 37.2 million people, is the world’s most populous urban area. After years of experiencing Japan only through the lens of Marunouchi, the ultra-modern city centre (https://www.propertychronicle.com/a-letter-from-tokyo/) my first step to better understanding this intriguing country was exploring Yanaka, part of the capital’s ‘old town’. Yanaka is only five subway stops from the physical perfection of Marunouchi, but the two districts offer complete contrasts between old and new, local and global, low-rise and high-rise. Five stops felt like travelling back five decades.

Yanaka is part of Tokyo’s Shitamachi, (meaning ‘the low city’) a town of temples and shrines, created under the planning policy of the nineteenth century. The district is both low and old, a real rarity in the centre of a dense and frequently rebuilt metropolis. Tokyo was – twice – almost wholly destroyed in the last century, exactly 100 years ago in the firestorms after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake and then again by the 1945 Allied firebombing. Yanaka escaped not only those two devastations but also demolition and redevelopment during the post-war economic miracle.

A celebrated Japanese proverb says the four things to fear most in life are earthquakes, thunder, fire and fathers (!). Earthquakes are a constant fact of life in a country with over a thousand tremors each year. It is only twelve years since Japan’s strongest recorded earthquake (9.0 on the Richter Scale) and memories remain vivid of the huge tsunami and meltdown of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, less than 300 km from the capital. With grim satisfaction, most of Tokyo’s built environment was considered to have weathered the severe seismic test of 2011.