Tokyo Parks and Gardens

Tokyo’s parks and gardens are among the highlights of a visit to the city, providing calm and tradition among the concrete sprawl and neon lit skyscrapers. Rikugien, Hama Rikyu, Kyu Shiba Rikyu, the Hotel New Otani and Koshikawa Korakuen are the best examples of Edo stroll gardens, though the East Gardens at the Imperial Palace and Shinjuku Gyoen both have excellent Japanese gardens as well as expanses of grass to lie on. Yoyogi Park is great on a Sunday and is one of the few central parks where ball sports are allowed. Nearby, the Meiji Jingu Shrine is, along with Horikiri Gardens, the best place to see the iris displays every June, and the Meiji Inner Gardens near the National Stadium are among the most beautiful in the city.

Ueno is dirty and overcrowded but also home to the city’s best zoo and most of its best museums. If you’re in a more reflective mood, try the Nature Study Institute and Park near Meguro Station, fifty aces of primeval woodland in the centre of the city that is open to just a few hundred visitors at any one time.

Among the best places to view the cherry blossom at the end of March are Ueno, Sumida Park, Yasukuni Shrine, Shinjuku Gyoen and the Meiji Outer Gardens. Nedujinja Shrine near Nezu Metro Station has an azalea viewing festival every April.

Quick Tips:

Pick up a copy of the Tokyo Handy Guide from the information centres at Keisei Ueno Station or the Metropolitan Government Building. As well as useful maps there's an excellent discount section at the back with reduced admission to most of the major gardens.

The Metropolitan Government and Japan Guide both have good guides to the city’s parks and gardens.

Ueno Zoo has free admission on Greenery Day (May 4th) and Tokyo Citizens Day (October 1st). The Imperial Palace Gardens are closed on Mondays and Fridays, and all of the major gardens close at New Year.

Best Way To Get Around:

Although you can walk between a few of the city’s major gardens - Hama Rikyu and Kyu Shiba Rikyu for example - the best way to get around is by metro or JR train. The Toei - Tokyo Metro One Day Pass offers unlimited travel on both lines for 1,000 yen but the best option is the JR Yamanote Line, which has stations within easy walking distance of Shinjuku Gyoen, the Imperial Palace, Yoyogi Park, Hama Rikyu, Rikugien and Ueno Park.

An alternative way to get to Hama Rikyu is to take the cruise down the Sumnida River from Asakusa Pier. Boats stop at the entrance to the gardens.

A few miles east of Ueno on the Keisei Line, the 6000 pink, purple and white irises at Horikiri burst open every June, turning a small space jammed into the anonymous twists and turns of suburban Tokyo into one of the city’s busiest public gardens.

Stuck between a concrete road bridge, an apartment building and a children‘s playground, the garden is virtually deserted outside of the month long Japanese Iris Festival, when thousands of kimono clad women and old men in floppy hats converge on the flowers to stroll and take photos. The whole of the small garden can be seen in one sweeping gaze. Near the entrance a stone bridge no more than a foot above water level traces a gentle arc between circular hedges and sloping tree trunks, fronting a square traversed by winding wooden boards and gravel paths between the few other decorative features - a stone lantern and wooden trellis fencing. Visitor facilities are spotted around irregularly - a couple of tatami mat rooms at the front gate, some low wooden benches along the pathways and a tiny viewing hut tucked away at the top of some steps in the back corner. It may not sound very much, but the overall effect is quite lovely - a typically subtle Japanese triumph over the mundane concrete surroundings. Even the garden’s inconvenient location works in its favour - while tourists flock to Hama Rikyu, the East Gardens at the Imperial Palace and Ueno Park, Horikiri is undiscovered by all but the locals. Outside of the festival it’s not somewhere I’d recommend travelling too far to see, unless you really feel a desperate need to tick off every garden in the city. However, if you’re spending time in Ueno and want an afternoon away from the Tokyo tourist trail then Horikiri is a great place to while away an hour or two.

To reach Horikiri Gardens take the Keisei Line from Ueno or Nippori to Horikiri-shobuen Station then walk west for around five minutes. Entrance is free.

Next to the busiest station in the busiest part of the busiest city in the world, Shinjuku Gyoen is one of Tokyo’s largest parks at almost 150 acres. Laid out by a French engineer on the site of a feudal mansion, the park was initially an imperial garden before its opening to the public after World War 2. It’s a wonderful place to escape the orderly madness of the surrounding streets, only the occasional train engine and station announcement drifting over the outer walls to intrude on the studied hush.

The 200-yen entrance fee gets you into several very distinct spaces. The English Landscape Garden at the centre of the park is instantly reminiscent of London or New York; wide, cedar, plane and sycamore bordered clipped lawns busy with families sprawled across jackets and picnic mats. The jagged peaks of Shinjuku and the lonely spire of Tokyo Tower hang above the tree line, invisible once you’re a few metres along the paths running through the small forest towards Tamamo Pond and the Greenhouse, which has beautiful water lilies, orchids, towering palms and two floors of subtropical plants. At the back, the French Formal Gardens are small but probably the most photographed part of the whole park, the symmetrical rose bushes combining Mozart, Moonlight, Black Tea, Prosperity and a hundred other exotica.

But my own favourite is the Japanese Traditional Garden, at the eastern end of the string of ponds splitting the centre of the park, whose tightly wrapped, gently undulating mounds are dotted with manicured pine, stone lanterns, pavilions and shrubs. Teahouses stand on small islands linked by wooden bridges and the chrysanthemum displays here in October are almost as famous as the cherry blossom that explodes across the park every April.

The park is a short walk from the New South exit of Shinjuku Station and is open daily from 9am-4pm (11am-3:30pm for the greenhouse).

Almost everyone in Tokyo ends up at Ueno Park one time or another. Once the site of Kan‘eiji Temple, which protected the north eastern approach to Edo Castle, it was turned into a public park after most of its buildings were destroyed in battle during the Meiji Restoration and now houses six of Japan‘s best museums, its oldest zoo, a boating lake, lotus pond, and over 1,000 cherry blossom trees.

The zoo is famous for its three giant pandas and a five-storied pagoda, one of the few surviving structures from Kan‘eiji. The spacious grounds are split into two sections linked by a short monorail ride and, though cramped and dingy in a few corners, have impressive new facilities such as the Reptile House, Gorilla Forest, and a domestic petting zoo. Definitely Ueno‘s most family-friendly attraction, the zoo gets very crowded on holidays and weekends, especially around the panda enclosure.

Near the entrance to the zoo, don’t miss the approach to Toshogu Shrine, a long path lined with 50 copper lanterns, trees almost obscuring the top of the pagoda to the right, the copper, green, and deep red hall of worship straight ahead just as it was 300 years ago. Along with the tunnel of red torii gates leading down to the modest Gojo Shrine, it’s far and away my favourite place in the park.

Less positively, there’s a disappointing lack of places to sit and relax unless you pay to get into the zoo or the grounds of the National Museum. Shinobazu Pond is indicative of this problem, a few scruffy benches and some food stalls on the ma-made island next to Benzaiten Temple the only places to break your walk. The park’s not even an especially nice place to walk around: the main paths are overcrowded and the trees are strung with blue tarpaulin sheets for the hundreds of homeless people who live here. Outside of cherry blossom season or the summer ice sculpture festival, the only picnickers you're likely to see are old men with cans of beer and cigarettes. Ueno is Tokyo’s best park for culture, but it's well down the list for an afternoon in the sun.

A few metres from Hamamatsucho Station, the Kyu Shiba Rikyu Gardens is a seldom-visited stop along the well-beaten path to Hama Rikyu and Takeshiba Pier. Reputedly the oldest garden in Tokyo, it was first laid out for a feudal lord in the mid-17th century, designed around a large pond filled with sea water from the nearby Tokyo Bay. After being almost destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the garden is now bordered by some of the city‘s most famous landmarks: Tokyo Tower and the World Trade Centre building rising in the background of passing bullet trains and monorails, neon-lit billboards, and many-storied building sites.

The pond still dominates the garden, crisscrossed by stone bridges and encircled by paths, a traditional archery field and little mounds of grass decorated with trellises, trees, gazebos, and weather-beaten stone lanterns. In the far corner you can see the place where the tidal waters entered, while a small sandy beach runs along the nearside by the tilting, moss-flecked Yukimi Tohro stone lantern. Everything else is in beautifully crafted miniature, from the tiny arched bridge in the centre of the carp-filled pond to the perfectly rounded peak of Ohyama Mountain, which offers the best vantage point over the garden. Sitting among the pine trees and closely trimmed azalea bushes, Ohshima and Ukishima islands laze on the surface of the water, and a couple stroll hand-in-hand single file across the Saiko-No Tsutsumi walkway, slowly zigzagging their way towards the far bank. Even the clang of metal and the flashing advertising signs don’t seem to matter too much when you realize you’re the only three people around. Hama Rikyu is bigger and much more immediately impressive, but you have to share it with so many people that it’s difficult to appreciate. Kyu Shiba grows on you.