LegendKiyomasa's Well
The well was dug by Kato Kiyomasa, a warlord of the 1500s famous for building castles and finding water.
Source: Shrine tradition; the garden did belong to the Kato family
The story
Meiji Jingu is a Shinto shrine. It honours the spirits of the Emperor Meiji, who died in 1912, and his wife, the Empress Shoken, who died in 1914. In his reign of forty-five years Japan went from rule by samurai to railways, a parliament and a modern army.
The shrine opened in 1920. It was burned in the air raids of 1945 and rebuilt in 1958. What is truly a hundred years old here is the forest.
What is here
The shrine and its forest are free. Two things inside the grounds are paid for separately: the inner garden and the museum. The outer garden is a different place, three kilometres to the east.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The forest paths and the gates | Free |
| The barrels of sake and wine | Free |
| The great torii | Free |
| The courtyard, the main hall and the camphor trees | Free |
| The inner garden, with the iris beds and Kiyomasa's Well | 500 yen, paid at its gate |
| Meiji Jingu Museum | 1,000 yen |
| The outer garden: ginkgo avenue and picture gallery | A separate place; the avenue is free |
If you have one minute
Under the first gate, at the Harajuku entrance
Behind you is one of the loudest crossings in Tokyo. Walk twenty steps in and it is gone. The path is wide, covered in gravel, and bends so that you cannot see the end. The gravel is there to make you slow down, and to make a sound.
The gate is a torii. It marks the line between the ordinary world and the ground of the gods. People bow once before walking under it, and keep to one side. The middle of the path is left for the gods.
Look up. The trees meet overhead. They are evergreen oaks and camphor trees, which keep their leaves all year. A century ago this was open land with a few pines.
Ten minutes on you reach a courtyard and a plain hall of unpainted cypress with a green copper roof. There is no statue. In Shinto the god is not shown.
Things people often get wrong
"It is ancient." It is younger than the Eiffel Tower. The buildings you see are from 1958.
"The forest is natural." About 100,000 trees were given by people all over Japan and planted here by 110,000 young volunteers.
"The emperor is buried here." His tomb is in Kyoto. A shrine holds a spirit, not a body.
"It is a temple." Temples in Japan are Buddhist. This is a shrine, of Shinto, the older religion of Japan, whose gods are spirits of nature, of places and of ancestors.
"This is the shrine with the war dead." Chinese and Korean visitors sometimes confuse it with Yasukuni Shrine, which is a different place, four kilometres away. Only the emperor and empress are honoured here. It is also true that the wars with China in 1894 and Russia in 1904, and the taking of Taiwan and Korea, happened in this emperor's reign.
People who stood here
- The Emperor Meiji (1852–1912) and the Empress Shoken (1849–1914)They never saw the shrine, but they knew this ground. The garden beside it was an imperial property, and the emperor had the iris beds laid out there for the empress.
- Shibusawa Eiichi (businessman called the father of Japanese capitalism; his face is on the 10,000 yen note)When the emperor died, the tomb went to Kyoto. Shibusawa led the citizens of Tokyo who asked that the capital at least be given a shrine, and raised the money for it.
- Honda Seiroku (forester, called the father of Japan's parks)He designed the forest. The prime minister wanted rows of tall cedars. Honda refused, said cedars would die in Tokyo's smoke, and planted the trees that belong to this soil. He drew a chart showing how the forest would look after 50, 100 and 150 years. So far it has kept to the chart.
- Ito Chuta (the leading Japanese architect of his day)He designed the shrine buildings in 1915. He had travelled across China on a mule in 1902 and was the first to publish a study of the Yungang caves in Shanxi.
- King Prajadhipok, Rama VII (king of Siam, today's Thailand)He paid a state visit to the shrine in April 1931.
- Akebono, Asashoryu, Hakuho (grand champions of sumo, born in Hawaii and Mongolia)Every new grand champion of sumo performs his first ring-entering ceremony in this courtyard, in a white rope belt, before the main hall. Akebono did so in 1993 as the first champion born outside Japan.
- George W. Bush (American president)In February 2002 he came with Prime Minister Koizumi and watched archers shoot from galloping horses on the shrine's riding ground.
- Barack Obama (American president)In April 2014 he walked the path, wrote a wish on a wooden tablet and watched the mounted archers.
- Sakamoto Ryuichi (composer of the film music for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor)Weeks before his death in March 2023 he wrote to the governor of Tokyo asking her to stop the felling of old trees in the shrine's outer garden. It was one of his last public acts.
Go deeper: eight stops along the path from Harajuku to the main hall and the gardens
All the stops are on the walk from the Harajuku entrance to the main hall, except the last.
1. The first gate: Yoshino cedar
The gate at the entrance was replaced in 2022, for the first time since 1920. The new one is of cedar from Yoshino, near Nara.
A torii has two posts and two beams and no door. Nothing closes it. The line it marks is kept by custom alone.
2. The forest that was planned
In 1915 three foresters were given 70 hectares of thin pine wood and farmland and asked for an eternal forest. They decided that people should not have to look after it. It should renew itself.
They planted in layers. Tall pines went in first, to give quick shade. Under them went cypress and other conifers. Under those went young evergreen oaks, chinquapins and camphors, the trees that would naturally cover this part of Japan if people left it alone. The pines would die out, then the conifers, and the broad-leaved trees would take over.
That is what has happened. The rule for the gardeners is still the one set in 1920: sweep the leaves off the path back under the trees, and take nothing out. A survey in 2011 to 2013 counted about 3,000 kinds of plant and animal, some of them new to science.
3. Barrels of sake and barrels of wine
On the right of the path stands a wall of straw-wrapped barrels, each painted with the mark of a brewery. Brewers all over Japan give sake to the gods of the shrine each year. The barrels on show are empty.
Facing them on the left are oak barrels of wine from Burgundy in France. The Emperor Meiji cut off his topknot, wore a Western uniform, ate beef and drank wine with his meals, to show his people that these things could be done. The growers of Burgundy have sent barrels in his honour since 2006.
4. The great gate: a tree from Taiwan
Where the path turns left stands the largest wooden torii of its kind in Japan. It is 12 metres high. Each post is a single trunk 1.2 metres thick.
No cypress of that size was left in Japan. The trunks came from a tree about 1,500 years old on Mount Dandai in the mountains of Taiwan. The gate of 1920 was also of Taiwan cypress, from Alishan. Taiwan was then under Japanese rule. That gate was struck by lightning in 1966, and this one replaced it in 1975.
The gold flower on the beam, with sixteen petals, is a chrysanthemum, the crest of the imperial family.
5. Washing, and the south gate
Before the last gate is a roofed trough of running water with wooden ladles. Take a ladle in your right hand and pour water over your left. Change hands. Pour a little into your left palm and rinse your mouth from it, never from the ladle. Tip the ladle upright so the rest runs down the handle.
The gate ahead is of cypress with copper fittings. Look at the metal covers on the beam ends. Many are cut with a small heart shape. It is an old Japanese pattern called "boar's eye", meant to keep off fire and evil.
6. The courtyard and the main hall
The hall in front of you is where people pray. The gods' own room is behind it, out of sight. All the wood is Japanese cypress from the Kiso valley, left bare.
To pray, go up to the box, throw in a coin, bow twice, clap twice, bow once more.
On the night of 14 April 1945 fire bombs fell on the shrine and the main buildings burned. They were rebuilt by 1958 with money given by the public, to the first design.
To the left of the hall two camphor trees stand side by side, tied together with a thick straw rope. They were planted in 1920 and have grown into one round crown. People call them the husband-and-wife camphors.
Round a third tree hang thousands of small wooden tablets. A visitor writes a wish on one and leaves it. Read a few: they are in every language.
The paper slips sold here are unusual. At most shrines a slip tells your fortune, good or bad. Here each slip carries a short poem by the emperor or the empress. He wrote about a hundred thousand in his life, and she about thirty thousand.
あさみどり澄みわたりたる大空の 広きをおのが心ともがな
The great sky, pale blue and clear from end to end: I wish my own heart could be as wide.
A waka by the Emperor Meiji, 1904; our translation
7. The inner garden
A small gate off the main path leads to the only part of the grounds older than the shrine. In the Edo period it was the garden of a lord's house. The emperor often brought the empress here.
The iris beds run along a little valley. There are about 150 kinds, and they flower in June.
At the head of the valley is a spring that never dries, flowing at about 60 litres a minute at the same temperature all year. It is called Kiyomasa's Well. In 2009 a television programme called it a place of power, and people queued for hours to photograph it.
8. The museum, and the garden outside
Near the Harajuku entrance is a low building of wood and glass by the architect Kuma Kengo, opened in 2019. It holds the carriage in which the emperor rode on the day the constitution was given in 1889.
The outer garden is a separate place, twenty minutes away by train. It has an avenue of ginkgo trees that turns yellow in late November, a picture gallery of the emperor's life, and the stadiums. A plan to rebuild it and cut down many old trees has been fought over since 2022. The novelist Murakami Haruki spoke against it.
In the video game Persona 5 (2016) the shrine is one of the places in Tokyo where the hero can spend an afternoon with a friend.
The picture most visitors take is the great torii from the path, with the gold flowers on its beam. Stand well back on the right-hand side, so that the gate fills the frame and the trees close over it.