No, not Marco Polo.
Marco definitely was no mediaevel Venetian trader. He was a young and happily-drunk Polish expatriate in Tokyo who was looking for someone to talk to.
"It's been years since I spoke to a European," he said as we drank our Asahis and listened to the really bad and enthusiastic karaoke being sung inside the bar we were sitting outside.
"How long have you been in Japan?" I asked.
"Three years," he said.
"And what is it that you do in Japan?" I asked.
"Well, until two weeks ago," he said, "I was in prison."
Marco, it turned out, is a minor gangster in the mean streets of Asakusa.
"D'you wanna know why it's so safe to walk about late at night in Asakusa?" Marco asked me in a tone that suggested he was going to tell me anyway.
"It's because the Buddhist temple owns all the land, and the Yakuza control the streets.
"The police just ride their little bicycles around, but the real power is with the temple and the Yakuza."
Although it could be easily disputed that the monks of the Senso-ji Temple have that much power, one could not so easily dispute Marco's claim about the local Yakuza syndicate.
The Asakusa-based Matsuba-kai, with roughly 1,300 members, is among the more violent of Japan's Yakuza groups, and quite possibly does wield substantial hidden power in the district.
"Hidden" is the operative word. For most visitors to Asakusa, their only contact with the local Yakuza would be the sight of heavily-tattooed men hauling portable shrines through the streets during the Sanja Matsuri festival in mid-May.
Marco is probably not in the Pine Needle Association, but his friends who joined us were.
Marco introduced one as a boxer, and the other as the boxer's "manager".
They could almost have stepped straight out of a Tokyo production of Guys & Dolls.
The boxer, who looked to me like a Japanese version of "Nicely Nicely Johnson" in the movie, was very drunk and very friendly and kept wanting to hug me.
And when a drunken boxer-cum-gangster wants to give you a friendly hug, you let him.
A third man joins us, and Marco gets him to unclench his left fist, revealing that he only has half of a little finger.
Yubitsume is a form of apology in which the transgressor chops off the end of his left little finger and ceremonially presents it to his boss. Our new companion had, in his youth, had to perform yubitsume on himself.
I thought it wise not to ask him why.
"They [the Yakuza] can be very kind and very generous," Marco said, "but if you get on their wrong side they can be the most ruthless and vicious of enemies."
They would certainly have been well established in Asakusa 100 years ago when Rokku was Tokyo's major entertainment centre: its maze of alleys connecting its theatres, cinemas, opera-houses, music-halls, restaurants and brothels making Rokku a profitable ground for the Yakuza.
Asakusa was Tokyo's entertainment centre for about a century from 1841, when Tokugawa Ieyoshi expelled the "degenerate" Kabuki theatres from Tokyo.
The Meiji Restoration let the Kabuki theatres go back to Ginza and expanded the city's boundaries to include Asakusa, where Japan was introduced to Western-style opera, cinema, skyscrapers, Western-style amusement parks and subway trains to Japan.
Japan's first Western-style amusement park, Hanayashiki, is still operating nearly 160 years after it opened up in a corner of Asakusa Park.
Japan's first Western-style amusement park, Hanayashiki, is still operating nearly 160 years after it opened up in a corner of Asakusa Park.
Like most of Tokyo, Asakusa was completely destroyed in the resulting firestorms which killed around 200,000 and left over 1 million homeless. Asakusans who waded into the nearby Sumida River to escape the firestorm were boiled alive and the river the next morning was clogged with their corpses.
After the war, Tokyo's main entertainment districts moved west to where they're now centred around Shinjuku, Shibuya and Roppongi.
Whilst those districts are marked by Blade Runner-esque architecture from the economic boom of the 1970s and '80s, Asakusa predominantly consists of buildings from the post-war reconstruction of the 1950s and retains much of the atmosphere of the 'old' shitamachi Tokyo.
Most activity in Asakusa today is in Nakimase-dori, an always-busy 300-year-old shopping street that stretches between the outer and inner gates of the Senso-ji temple.
Senso-ji, established in 628AD, is Tokyo's oldest temple and one of its most significant.
The heart of Asakusa, Senso-ji, is the focal point for many of the festivals that liberally dot the Asakusa calendar.
One of the strangest of these is the annual naki-zumo festival, which is a "sumo wrestling-baby crying contest" in which two full-grown sumo wrestlers -- each holding an infant -- face up to each other in the ring: but the contest is between the babies to see which one can cry the loudest.
The winning baby, according to the 400-year tradition, will be blessed by the Shinto gods with good health.
One of the most colourful of Asakusa's annual festivals -- the 29th Annual Asakusa Samba Carnival -- took place the day after I met Marco not-Polo and his Yakuza friends.
The samba carnival largely consists of a six-hour-long procession of scantily-clad women dancing down Asakua's Edo-dori into Kanarimon-dori to finish outside Kanarimon -- Senso-ji's outer gate and the southern end of Nakimase-dori.
The parade had a taste of the old Brisbane Warana to it, though, with trucks disguised as fancifully-decorated floats, and the occasional toddler or infant participating in the parade.
The parade had a taste of the old Brisbane Warana to it, though, with trucks disguised as fancifully-decorated floats, and the occasional toddler or infant participating in the parade.The post-Samba partying continued late into the night in Rokku, giving a brief glimpse of what the area must have been like in its heyday.
But on the night before the Samba, it was quiet in Rokku and I was still drinking in the company of gangsters, trying to find a gracious way of leaving them.
So I told them I had an appointment to see a beautiful woman (the desk clerk of my ryokan, who I had to see so I could retrieve the key to my room).
Marco not-Polo, "Nicely Nicely", his manager "Thin Arata" and Yubitsume Yuji all shook my hand (although "Nicely Nicely" gave me another hug) and wished me good luck on what they thought was a romantic assignation.
Marco leaned over to me just before I left.
"If you ever find yourself in trouble in Asakusa," he said, "just ask around for Marco.
"I'll be sure to see that you're alright."
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