Tokyo is a hard ask, even for experienced travellers. In a city of Godzilla proportions (home to more than 36 million people, depending on how you count it), how do you find the human scale?

One way is to spend an afternoon in Yanaka, a puzzle of quiet streets just north of Ueno. It's regarded as the best example of the "old town" atmosphere of Edo (as Tokyo was known), destroyed by earthquake in the 1920s and bombs in World War II.