Indagare Insider Bryan Walsh shares his favorite park while he served as Time’s Tokyo Bureau Chief.
“Tokyo is not a city blessed with parks—you can go days without seeing a patch of green—but Shinjuku Goyen is pure loveliness. The best feature is the gardens: Japanese, French and English, all authentic, with a view of Shinjuku’s futuristic towers.”
It’s all here: As well as plenty of trees, grassland, a zoo, a fountain, a lake for boating, shrines and temples, Ueno Park is home to some of the city’s finest art galleries and museums. Opened 135 years ago, Ueno was Tokyo’s first public park and remains one of its finest. An astonishing array of museums and galleries in and around it cover Japanese art, Western art, science and history; the Tokyo National Museum alone has more than 100,000 items, which it displays in rotation. Within Ueno is the Toshogu Shrine, almost 400 years old, famous for the carvings of dragons on the front gate. It is easy to spend an entire day here, observing the Japan of today, on the park’s grounds, and of the past, in the surrounding buildings. Nearby is the Ameyoko market, composed of a packed collection of street stalls selling food and clothing and an adjoining mall with knickknacks and crafts for sale in a more formal setting.
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