Day 52: Today's Pick — Shimokitazawa, Tokyo

If you are flying to Tokyo and you give yourself a single Saturday afternoon to do something other than walk under blinking signs in Shinjuku, give that afternoon to Shimokitazawa.

Shimokita — locals shorten it — is a small, low-rise, hilariously walkable neighborhood about ten minutes by train from Shibuya, on the Odakyu and Keio lines. It is, by Tokyo standards, low. The buildings cap out at three or four stories. The streets are narrow enough that two scooters meeting head-on become a small social event. Everything is independent. Everything has been there for either five years or fifty years, and it is genuinely hard to tell which.

I want to walk you through what an afternoon there looks like, because the neighborhood is one of those places that rewards a loose plan more than a tight one.

You exit the south gate of Shimokitazawa Station, which has, in the last few years, been redone into a small, tasteful retail strip called Mikan Shimokita. Mikan is fine. Mikan is, frankly, a little more polished than the rest of the area. Walk through it and out the other side. This is where the neighborhood actually lives.

You will start to see the vintage shops. Shimokita is, depending on whom you ask, either the second- or third-best vintage clothes shopping district in the world. Stick Out (the famous flat-rate shop where everything is ¥700) is the entry-level destination; Don Don Down (everything goes down in price each Wednesday) is the local sport. New York Joe Exchange, in a converted bathhouse, is where you go if you want a leather jacket and a scene. There are also, by my last count, twelve other vintage shops, none of them chains, all run by extremely specific people with extremely specific opinions about denim.

Around lunchtime you get hungry. There is no shortage of food, but the move — the correct move — is curry rice. Magic Spice is a chain that started in Sapporo and operates on the soup-curry side of the spectrum; it is loud and bright and excellent. For a more classic Japanese curry rice, walk to Garlic Jo's or Shimokita Curry Festival's various pop-ups. Eat the curry. Take 25 minutes.

Now you walk. Shimokita is, possibly, Japan's best walking neighborhood for someone who likes to wander into shops at random. You will find: a record store stacked floor to ceiling with city pop; a kissaten (old-school coffee shop) with a single elderly proprietor and the kind of cherry-syrup soda that tastes like a memory of childhood you didn't have; a tiny bookstore with one English shelf and a cat asleep on it; a vintage camera dealer; a one-room theater showing midnight films; a sandwich shop with three seats. None of these places will be the destination. All of them will be, when you remember them later, the best part of the day.

In the early evening — around 5 pm — the basement bars and tiny live music venues open. Shimokita is the spiritual home of indie-rock Tokyo; bands from Cornelius to Yura Yura Teikoku played here when they were nobody. Live houses like Shelter and Daisy Bar will charge you a ¥2,500 cover and give you, in exchange, the experience of being three feet from a band you've never heard of in a sweaty basement that vibrates audibly.

A few practical notes. Avoid Saturdays and Sundays after 1 pm if you hate lines. Get there at 10 am. Bring a foldable bag for the vintage hauls. Don't bother with a tour; the neighborhood is small enough that you cannot meaningfully get lost. Closing time for shops is 7 or 8 pm; bars and live houses go until 11 or later.

Tokyo has a thousand neighborhoods. Most of them are good. Shimokita is the one that, the next morning at the airport, you'll already be planning to come back to.