Meiji Jingu

The shrine building is a 1958 reconstruction; the 1920 original burned in 1945. What is actually remarkable here is the wood you walk through to reach it. Around 100,000 trees of roughly 365 species were donated from across Japan and the empire and planted by volunteers in the 1910s and 1920s, on what had been bare and largely marshy ground.

It was designed as a chinju no mori, a shrine forest, and specifically designed to become self-sustaining and to look, within a century or so, as though nobody had planted it. That century is up. The canopy you walk under now is the intended final state of a hundred-year landscape plan, which is a rarer thing to be standing in than any of the buildings.

Practically, it means that the seven hundred metres from the Harajuku torii to the main hall is the visit. Walk it slowly. It is one of the few places in central Tokyo where the traffic noise actually stops, and it is about eleven degrees of subjective difference from Takeshita-dori, which is three minutes away.

The Inner Garden (Gyoen) is ¥500 and is worth it in exactly one window: early to mid June, when the iris garden is out. It has around 150 varieties, it was laid out for the Empress Shoken, and for those two or three weeks it is one of the best things in the city. Outside that window it is a pleasant pond and a well of clear water, and ¥500 is a fair price for somewhere to sit rather than a reason to come.

The Meiji Jingu Museum is also ¥500, a low timber Kengo Kuma building near the south entrance holding possessions of the Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken – including the carriage used for the 1889 promulgation of the constitution. It is small, it takes forty minutes, and it closes well before the grounds do.

Both are optional. The free walk is the reason to come, and a visit that spends nothing here is not a lesser visit.

Go early. The shrine opens at first light, the approach is empty, and if you arrive before 09:00 on a Saturday or Sunday there is a real chance of seeing a Shinto wedding procession cross the main courtyard under a red parasol. That is not staged for visitors; it is simply when weddings happen here.

The 1 to 3 January period is the single busiest religious event in Japan – several million people come for hatsumode, the first shrine visit of the year, and the approach becomes a managed one-way queue. It is an extraordinary thing to witness and a terrible thing to schedule casually.

Pair it with Shibuya to the south rather than with another temple. The point of Meiji Jingu is contrast, and the walk from the north gate down through Harajuku to the Scramble Crossing compresses a century of Tokyo into twenty-five minutes. The Nezu Museum garden, twenty minutes east, is the other good half of a green day.