Explore Tokyo in Google Street View

Tokyo does not use street names for addresses. An address is a ward, then a district, then a numbered block, then a numbered building within that block, and the numbering follows the order the buildings were registered rather than their position. This is the single most useful thing to know before exploring, because it explains why the city feels like a set of interiors rather than a network of routes. The block is the unit, and the street is just the gap between blocks.

Shibuya Crossing is the obvious first stop and it deserves the reputation. Five crossings release at once and the imagery has caught it mid-cycle, with people filling the entire intersection. What the photographs never convey is how ordinary the surrounding buildings are: it is a busy junction outside a station, and the spectacle is entirely the people.

Two hundred metres from any main road, Tokyo becomes quiet. The residential lanes behind Shibuya and Shinjuku are barely wide enough for one car, lined with potted plants outside front doors, with no pavement and no through traffic. Google captured a great many of these, and they are the parts of the city that surprise people most, because they are silent and low-rise in the middle of the largest metropolitan area on earth.

Golden Gai, near Shinjuku, is six alleys of tiny two-storey bars, most of them seating fewer than ten people, on a plot that survived redevelopment because of a long-running dispute over the land. The alleys are too narrow for a car and were captured on foot. Nearby Omoide Yokocho does the same thing with grilled food and even less space.

For the older city, go to Asakusa. Senso-ji is Tokyo's oldest temple and the approach along Nakamise-dori is a covered market street running straight at the gate, several hundred metres of stalls. It was photographed on foot. The contrast with Ginza, twenty minutes away and entirely glass and flagship stores, is the clearest illustration of how many different Tokyos are inside the same city.

One quirk of the imagery. Japan has some of the best trekker coverage anywhere, so a surprising number of shrine paths, park routes and shopping arcades exist at walking pace rather than car height. If a route looks like it should be walkable, it is usually worth checking, because it frequently is.