Tokyo Imperial Palace

The whole walled area covers about 1.15 square kilometres of central Chiyoda and stands on the retrenchments of Edo Castle, which the Tokugawa shoguns enlarged into the largest stronghold ever built in Japan. Emperor Meiji moved in during 1869. Most of what stood here burned in the firebombing of 25 May 1945; the present palace hall, the Kyuden, was finished in 1968, put into use in April 1969, and covers 24,175 square metres in seven wings.

The Emperor lives in the Fukiage Palace, completed in 1993, in the western part of the grounds. None of those buildings is open to visitors on any day of the year, and that is the first thing to understand: nobody tours the inside of the Imperial Palace.

The East Gardens, the part that is simply a park

The eastern third of the compound was renamed the East Garden in 1948 and opened to the public in 1968, and it takes in the old Honmaru, Ninomaru and Sannomaru enclosures of the castle: about 210,000 square metres, declared a Special Historic Site on 30 May 1963. This is the piece with no admission, no reservation and three gates. It is also the piece with the closed days most trips fall foul of, because it shuts on Mondays and Fridays rather than the single Monday most museums keep.

The guided tour, which is free but not spontaneous

The Imperial Household Agency runs an escorted walk on the grounds proper, twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It sells nothing. What it requires instead is an application and, on the day, a permit number and photographic identification.

The route is about 2.2 kilometres, takes roughly an hour and passes the palace, the East Court in front of the Chowaden, the Fujimi watchtower, the Hasuike moat, the Imperial Household Agency building, the Fushimi watchtower and the iron bridge, all of which are otherwise invisible from outside.

The outer plaza, which never closes

Around all of it lies Kokyo Gaien National Garden, run not by the Imperial Household Agency but by the Ministry of the Environment: a little over a square kilometre of moats, pine plantings, lawns and paths ringing the walls, twelve moats in all, taking in Kitanomaru Garden to the north. It publishes no admission and no closing time. This is where the photograph everybody has seen is taken from, and you can take it at any hour, on a Monday, in the rain, without telling anyone you are coming.

Opening is at 09:00 every day the gardens run, and closing moves five times a year, which catches out anyone who plans a late afternoon here in winter. From 1 March to 14 April the gardens close at 17:00, with last entry at 16:30. From 15 April to the end of August they hold on until 18:00, last entry 17:30.

September drops back to 17:00, October to 16:30, and from 1 November to the end of February the gates shut at 16:00 with last entry at 15:30. There is no admission charge and no reservation of any kind: the agency's own page prints the fee and booking line as not required.

The two closed days, and the exception inside the exception

The gardens close on Mondays and Fridays, from 28 December to 3 January, and on days when a court event gets in the way. Public holidays are open, with one exception: the Emperor's Birthday. And there is a rule beneath the rule.

When a Monday is a holiday the gardens open on that Monday and close the following Tuesday instead, so a Tuesday visit in a holiday week can fail even though Tuesday is normally a good day. The agency publishes a closed-day calendar for exactly this reason, and it is worth a glance the night before rather than a shrug at the gate.

Which gate, and what you find inside each

Three gates admit visitors. Ote-mon, the castle's old main gate, is the one to use from Tokyo Station and the one the guided walks meet at. Hirakawa-mon and Kitahanebashi-mon sit on the north side, five minutes from Takebashi station, and put you straight at the foot of the donjon base.

You are handed a numbered token on the way in and give it back on the way out, which is how the agency counts who is still inside at closing.

What is actually in there

The headline is the Tenshudai, the stone platform of the great keep, which you climb for a view over the Honmaru lawn: the tower it carried burned in the seventeenth century and was never rebuilt. Below it are the Ninomaru garden and pond, relaid in 1968 from a plan drawn in the reign of the ninth shogun; a grove of 260 trees representing every prefecture in 30 varieties; the Suwa no Chaya teahouse, rebuilt in 1912 and moved here when the gardens were made; and three Edo guardhouses, the Doshin-bansho, the O-bansho and the hundred-man Hyakunin-bansho. The Fujimi-yagura watchtower and the long Fujimi-tamon storehouse are the only substantial Edo structures left standing.

The octagonal Tokagakudo music hall, its eight outer walls each in a different mosaic, was built for the sixtieth birthday of Empress Kojun and finished in February 1966. A marker on the Honmaru lawn shows where the Matsu no Orokka, the great pine corridor, ran, and another shows the site of the Ooku, the women's quarters. The Museum of the Imperial Collections stands here too, closed for rebuilding until 3 November 2026.

The rules below come from the agency's own visit guide for the palace. There are two departures a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, each capped at 200 people, with any single group limited to 50. It costs nothing.

There are three ways to get on it. Online applications open at 05:00 Japan time on the first day of the month before the month you want, and close at 23:59 four days before your date. You can apply by post or in person at the agency's tour office.

Or you can turn up on the day at Kikyo-mon, where numbered tickets are handed out one per person until they run out.

The suspensions are the part that breaks plans

No tour runs on a Sunday or a Monday, or on a public holiday unless that holiday falls on a Saturday. From 1 July to 30 September the afternoon departure is dropped completely, so a summer visit means a morning or nothing. Nothing runs from 28 December to 4 January, and individual dates or single departures are suspended whenever a court event needs the ground.

The agency prints a month-by-month calendar marking each day as full, morning-only, afternoon-only or closed, and it is the only reliable source: in the month we read it, the afternoon slot was struck out on every single open day.

What you need in your hand on the day

The permit number from your confirmation, printed or screenshotted, and photographic identification, which the agency lists as a driving licence, a My Number card or a student card, with a passport doing the same job for a foreign visitor. Photocopies are refused outright and anyone who cannot show the document is not admitted. Bags are inspected at the gate, and the agency asks you to leave what you can in a coin locker first.

Visitors under 18 must be accompanied by an adult. Once an application is complete the date, time and party cannot be changed; only reducing the number of people is allowed.

What the hour actually shows you

The route is a 2.2-kilometre loop with, in the agency's own words, little shade, and it takes about an hour on foot. It passes the former Privy Council building, the Fujimi watchtower, the Hasuike moat, the long Fujimi-tamon, the Imperial Household Agency building, the East Court in front of the Kyuden, the palace itself from the outside, the Seimon iron bridge that everyone calls Nijubashi, the Fushimi watchtower and the Yamashita path. You do not go inside any building.

The tour runs in rain and is called off in severe weather, and the agency does not publish the clock times of the two departures on its guide page: the permit notification carries them. Commercial sightseeing operators are barred from applying, which is why no platform sells this tour and why anyone offering to book it for you is selling something else.

The two days the main gate opens

On 2 January and on the Emperor's Birthday the public is let in through the Nakamon to the East Court, where the imperial family appears on the Chowaden balcony and the emperor gives a short address. Those are the only days the formal main gate is used for anybody but a head of state or an ambassador presenting credentials, and they are also the two days the East Gardens are least useful, so treat them as a separate outing rather than a bonus.

Kokyo Gaien National Garden is the ring of open ground around the walls, managed by the Ministry of the Environment rather than the Imperial Household Agency, and it covers a little over a square kilometre including twelve moats and Kitanomaru Garden. The plaza in front of the main gate is a gravel expanse planted with several hundred black pines, and the path across it leads to the low viewing point every photograph of the palace is taken from. The service centre publishes a phone number and an address but no opening or closing time, because there is no gate to close.

The bridge is not the one you think

The classic view is a stone bridge in the foreground, the main gate to the left, an iron bridge behind, and the Fushimi watchtower rising over the trees. Nijubashi, the double bridge, is the iron bridge at the back, not the stone one in front and not the pair together. The name comes from the Edo period, when the span sat so high above the moat that it was built as a wooden bridge braced underneath by a second wooden bridge.

Almost every guidebook and half the signage gets this wrong, and the Ministry of the Environment states it plainly on its own page for the main gate and the Nijubashi double bridge.

When the main gate opens, and to whom

The gate is the formal entrance to the palace and is used only when the emperor leaves for a state occasion, when a state guest arrives, or when an ambassador presents credentials, in which case the ambassador may choose to arrive by horse-drawn carriage. It opens to the public on 2 January and on the Emperor's Birthday and on no other day.

The rest of the outer ring

Wadakura Fountain Park sits on the Tokyo Station side and is where the guided walks meet. Sakuradamon, the gate where a Tokugawa chief minister was assassinated in 1860, stands on the south-west corner. North of the compound, Kitanomaru Garden was held by the Imperial Guard from 1874 to 1945 and is now a public park containing the Nippon Budokan, and the moat beside it, Chidorigafuchi, is one of the city's heaviest cherry blossom crowds in season, covered on the best time to visit page.

Permission is required in the outer garden for commercial photography, sales and any organised gathering, which is worth knowing if you are shooting anything that looks like a paid session.

Pick by what you came for. The short version is a photograph and a moat; the full version is a castle without a castle; the guided version is the only one that gets you inside the ceremonial half.

The half day that works best

Enter at Ote-mon at 09:00, walk up Shiomi-zaka to the donjon base, come down through Ninomaru, leave by Hirakawa-mon and be at Takebashi station by 10:30. That leaves the whole afternoon for Ueno's museums or a walk down to Ginza, and it is the version we would book if the trip allowed one visit here.

• Nijubashi is the iron bridge behind, not the stone bridge in front and not the two together, and the name refers to a vanished Edo bridge that was propped up by a second bridge underneath (Ministry of the Environment, Kokyo Gaien National Garden, page on the Main Gate and the Nijubashi Double Bridge)
• The great keep of Edo Castle has not existed since the seventeenth century; what you climb in the East Gardens is its bare stone platform, and a non-profit founded in 2004 has been campaigning to rebuild the tower ever since, without agency backing (English Wikipedia, Tokyo Imperial Palace)
• The East Gardens close on Fridays as well as Mondays, which no other major sight in the city does, and a Monday that is a public holiday pushes the closure to the Tuesday (Imperial Household Agency, East Gardens visitor guidance)
• The free guided tour cannot be booked through any travel company: the agency states that sightseeing businesses and the agents who recruit for them are not permitted, so every commercial Imperial Palace tour is a walk through the free gardens or the free outer plaza (Imperial Household Agency, application notes)
• The museum inside the East Gardens, the Museum of the Imperial Collections, has been closed for renovation and expansion since 2025 and gives its grand opening as Tuesday 3 November 2026, so trip reports praising it are describing a building nobody has been able to enter for over a year (Sannomaru Shozokan official site)

For Ote-mon and the East Gardens: Otemachi station, exit C13a, five minutes on foot, on the Chiyoda, Tozai, Marunouchi, Hanzomon and Toei Mita lines. Nijubashi-mae station on the Chiyoda line, exit 6, is ten minutes. Tokyo Station's Marunouchi north exit is fifteen minutes and the pleasanter walk, straight down the avenue past the brick station facade.

For Hirakawa-mon and Kitahanebashi-mon on the north side: Takebashi station, exit 1a, on the Tozai line, five minutes.

Getting it wrong is a twenty-minute mistake

The compound is a walled kilometre across and the moat has no crossings between gates, so arriving at the wrong side costs a long walk on a pavement with no shade. Nijubashi-mae puts you at the plaza and the photograph; Otemachi and Tokyo Station put you at the gardens; Takebashi puts you at the back. Bicycles and private cars are not allowed inside, tour coaches have to arrange parking through the Kokyo Gaien office, and the getting around page covers which pass, if any, is worth buying for a day built like this.

The gardens open at 09:00 and close as early as 16:00 in winter, which makes them the only major sight in central Tokyo that is finished before most people have thought about dinner. Put them first. From Ote-mon you are fifteen minutes from Tokyo Station and can be anywhere on the network by mid-morning, which is why this half-day pairs so cleanly with an afternoon in Ueno or an evening on the other side of the river.

The three-day itinerary places it on the morning of day two for exactly this reason.

The version for a rainy day

There is almost no shelter inside the gardens: two rest houses and a lot of open lawn. In heavy rain, walk the plaza for the bridge, spend ten minutes on it, and move the rest of the plan indoors. The guided grounds tour, by contrast, runs in rain and is only cancelled in severe weather, so a permit is not wasted by a wet forecast.