Azabu-Juban is the neighbourhood that kept its corner shops while embassies and tower blocks went up all around it, and this walk leans on that contrast: an unhurried old shopping street, then the most photographed pairing in the city.
Start on the shotengai — the old shopping street — and eat first. The taiyaki and senbei (rice-cracker) shops have outlasted the property boom, and a sugar runway helps before the climb. Past the little Azabu-Juban Inari shrine, then up the hill to the Tokyo Tower: the 1958 lattice mast, a few metres taller than the Eiffel it borrows from, painted orange and white for the aircraft. You don't have to go up — the tower is best from underneath, looking straight up through the legs.
Then down to Zojoji, where the 1622 Sangedatsumon gate frames the red tower behind it. Walk the rows of small Jizo statues in their red bibs and pinwheels along the temple's edge; they turn even when there's no wind. End in Shiba Park, one of Japan's oldest, on a bench with the tower overhead — and out at Onarimon, the shogun's old gate, on the Mita line.
