The collection
Kanto · Lanterns, ginkgo and the eastern capital
Time the trip to the trees. When the cherry blossom comes, Tokyo eats and drinks outdoors beneath it, and in Ueno Park paper lanterns are hung so the parties can go on late into the night. The ginkgo is the city's official tree, and in autumn its leaves turn bright yellow and fall, sometimes within days. The row of ginkgos in the Meiji Shrine Outer Garden is where to see it.
Arrive by Shinkansen and you step off on the Yaesu side of Tokyo Station, facing Nihonbashi. The station's brick front of 1914 is on the other side, looking toward the Imperial Palace. The palace stands on the ground of Edo Castle, where Tokugawa Ieyasu ruled the country after he became shogun in 1603. Edo was the seat of the shoguns for 265 years, until the Meiji government renamed it Tokyo, the eastern capital, on 3 September 1868. Greater Tokyo now holds 33 million people, and Edo survives inside it in pieces. In the East Gardens of the palace are the foundations of the castle keep, laid after the fire of 1657 for a new keep that was never built.
Tokyo's oldest temple. The story of its founding goes back to 628, when 2 brothers fishing in the Sumida River found a statue of Kannon. You come in under the Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate, where a red-and-black lantern 3.9 metres tall hangs between statues of the gods of wind and thunder. From there Nakamise-dōri runs about 250 metres to the temple, past around 72 shops selling fans, woodblock prints and sweets. Shops have stood on this approach since 1685.
Dedicated to Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken and formally opened in 1920, the shrine is built of Japanese cypress and copper on the site of an iris garden the couple used to visit. It stands in a forest of 70 hectares, 120,000 trees of 365 species given by people from every part of Japan, and many people come here to walk and rest in the middle of the city. The entrances open at sunrise and close at sunset.
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Yaesu, at Tokyo Station
The Roman jeweller's hotel on floors 40 to 45 of a tower at Tokyo Station, looking out to the Imperial Palace and Mount Fuji.
In front of the Hachikō exit of Shibuya Station, the signals stop traffic in every direction at once, and up to 3,000 people cross together from all sides. About 260,000 people use it on an ordinary weekday, and as many as 500,000 on the busiest days. Shibuya Sky, the open-air deck on top of Shibuya Scramble Square, overlooks the whole district.
The grounds cover 1.15 square kilometres and most of them are closed to the public, but the East Gardens, once the castle's inner rings of defence, have been a public park since 1968. The Ninomaru garden there is planted with trees from every prefecture of Japan and has an iris garden, and a tea house built by Emperor Meiji in 1912 stands in the grounds.
Completed in 1958 at 333 metres, modelled on the Eiffel Tower and painted white and international orange for air safety. It was the tallest tower in Japan until Tokyo Skytree in 2012, and its Top Deck is 250 metres up. From dusk to midnight, floodlights light the whole frame: orange from October to early July, and white through the summer.
First bridged in 1603 and rebuilt in stone on a steel frame in 1911, this is Japan's kilometre zero: a highway sign giving the distance to Tokyo is giving the distance to this bridge. An expressway was built over it before the 1964 Olympics and hid the old view of Mount Fuji, and in 2020 work was approved to move that stretch of road underground. Mitsukoshi, Japan's first department store, was founded in the district around it.
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