Meiji Jingu

Meiji Jingu enshrines Emperor Meiji, who reigned from 1867 to 1912, and his consort Empress Shoken. It was established in 1920 to commemorate the pair who, in the shrine's own words, took the initiative to lay the foundation of a modernised Japan. That is the whole of the religious brief: this is not an ancient site with a long medieval history, it is a national memorial built in the twentieth century in an older architectural language.

The graves are not here either. Emperor Meiji is buried at Fushimi-momoyama, south of Kyoto.

The forest was farmland, and every tree in it was a gift

Before the shrine, the land was the Minami-toshima imperial estate: apart from the ground that is now the Inner Garden, it was mostly fields and rough open country. To make what the planners called an eternal forest, about 100,000 trees were donated from every part of Japan and planted by around 110,000 young volunteers who also cut the approaches. The forestry scientists in charge, Honda Seiroku, Hongo Takanori and Uehara Keiji, chose broadleaf evergreens such as shii, kashi and kusunoki, arguing that Tokyo's air was already killing the city's old trees and that only evergreen broadleaf would still be standing in a century.

• Prime Minister Okuma Shigenobu wanted cedar, like the avenues at Ise and Nikko, and was talked out of it: cedar wants damp valleys and does not thrive on this ground.
• In April 1945 an air raid destroyed most of the shrine buildings. The forest survived and sheltered people, and the shrine's own account suggests the broadleaf planting, rather than resinous conifers, is part of the reason.
• At planting the inner precinct held about 120,000 trees of 365 species. The second comprehensive survey, published in 2013, counted about 36,000 trees of 234 species: natural thinning, with the survivors far larger.
• That survey also recorded roughly 3,000 species of living things inside the fence, including new records and threatened species, in the middle of a city of millions.

The practical consequence is the walk. Seventy hectares of closed canopy sits between every entrance and the main buildings, which is why the shrine tells visitors that the station-to-entrance time in its access table is only the beginning and that the shrine buildings are another ten minutes on foot from any gate. It is also why the temperature drops as you go in, and why the place is worth doing early: the forest muffles the city before the city is awake.

Every approach ends in the same place: a gravelled forest path, a purification basin, a wooden gate and then a courtyard with the main sanctuary at the far side. The shrine asks that you do not photograph the sanctuary itself, where people are praying, and that request is posted rather than implied. Everything else on the way is fair game.

The wall of sake barrels, and the wine barrels opposite

The single most photographed thing on the south approach is a stacked wall of decorated sake casks, donated by brewers from across the country. Facing them, and much less photographed, is a row of Burgundy wine barrels sent from France. Both are offerings rather than stock, and the pairing is a small monument to the reign the shrine commemorates: the emperor whose court took up Western dress and Western wine is thanked in both currencies at once.

The courtyard, the votive tablets and the fortune that is not a fortune

In the main courtyard you will find racks of ema, the small wooden tablets people write wishes on, and a wall of prayers left by visitors in a dozen languages. The omikuji sold here are not fortunes. Meiji Jingu's own oracle, called Omigokoro, is a set of thirty poems, fifteen by Emperor Meiji and fifteen by Empress Shoken, each with a commentary.

There is no good luck or bad luck printed on it, which is unusual enough that people who collect omikuji elsewhere are often confused by it.

• Goshuin, the calligraphed shrine seal, is issued at Nagadono, the counter in front of the Kaguraden, from 09:00 until the gates close. The shrine notes the counter can move on a busy day.
• Amulets and tablets are sold at three places: Nagadono, the Kaguraden and the south counter.
• Old amulets from this shrine go in the furu-ofuda box to the right of the south purification basin. Amulets from other shrines and lucky charms are not accepted there.

If you want the shrine as more than a photograph, come on a weekend morning. Shinto weddings are held here, and a wedding procession crossing the courtyard behind a priest and a red parasol is a routine sight rather than a staged one. The shrine's own website links its ceremonies to Meiji Kinenkan, the hall in the outer precinct that arranges them, which is the clearest sign that these are real ceremonies and not a display.

Watch from a distance, stay out of the line of the procession, and do not photograph faces.

The variable is not the shrine, which is one courtyard, but the walking. Ten minutes in and ten minutes out is fixed whatever you do, so a visit that only reaches the courtyard is already half walking. That is also why the two paid parts are worth deciding on before you go in rather than at the gate: the Inner Garden sits off the south approach, so it costs you almost no extra walking, while the museum is near the south entrance and the Treasure Museum building is at the far north end of the precinct.

Two consequences matter for planning. First, a winter afternoon is short: in December the gates shut at 16:00, which is before many people have finished lunch on a jet-lagged first day. Second, a June morning is enormous: the gates open at 05:00, roughly four hours before anything else in the city, which makes this the single best first stop of a Tokyo trip for anyone awake at the wrong time.

The shrine adds one warning to that table which is easy to miss: individual places and facilities inside the grounds keep shorter hours, mainly 09:00 to 16:00. So arriving at 05:30 in July gets you the forest, the approach and the courtyard, and gets you nothing at all that has a door on it. There is no closed day.

The grounds are open every day of the year, including the days when most of the city's museums shut.

Is it open at night?

No. The gates close at sunset and there is no evening opening, no illumination event in the standard calendar and no late admission. The one exception in the year is New Year, when the shrine receives the largest hatsumode crowds in Japan and the timetable is announced separately on its own site. If you want a Tokyo landmark after dark, that is a job for the observation decks, not for this one.

The Inner Garden, Meiji Jingu Gyoen, was a daimyo garden belonging to the Kato and then the Ii families in the Edo period. It became imperial property in the Meiji era and was laid out as a strolling garden around 1893, on the emperor's instruction, for an empress in poor health. The shrine states plainly that the presence of this garden was one of the main reasons Yoyogi was chosen as the site at all.

Inside are Kiyomasa's Well, a spring that yields an average of 60 litres a minute at a steady temperature of about 15 degrees Celsius all year, the South Pond it feeds, the tea house rebuilt in 1958 after the war destroyed the 1900 original, and the iris field.

June is the only month the garden has a queue

The iris field was planted in 1903 at the emperor's wish for the empress. It held about eighty Edo-lineage varieties at the shrine's founding and now runs to roughly 150 varieties and 1,500 plants, and the shrine publishes a bloom count during the season: on one day in early June this year the tally was 4,897 flowers open. That is the month the garden's hours stretch to 18:00 at weekends, and the month the $3.24 is unarguable.

In February, with the same fee, you are paying for a quiet pond.

What the museum is, and what it is not

The Meiji Jingu Museum opened in October 2019, designed by Kengo Kuma, about 3,200 square metres over two floors with a low, wide roof and a first-floor view back into the trees. It holds the emperor's and empress's own things: the desk and writing tools in daily use, the books they read, the six-horse state carriage that has been restored. The building most guidebooks still call the Treasure Museum is a different, older one at the north end of the precinct, and it is not a place you can simply turn up to.

The collection moved out in 2019 and the 1921 hall now opens only for limited periods announced on the shrine's site.

- The forest is planted, and it is shrinking on purpose. About 100,000 donated trees went in between 1915 and 1920; the survey published in 2013 counted roughly 36,000 trees of 234 species against about 120,000 of 365 species at planting, as the canopy closed and the survivors grew [meijijingu.or.jp forest and highlights pages, read in Q3 2026]. - The museum shuts on Thursdays, and shuts again between exhibitions. It was closed from 7 to 25 September 2026 for a changeover and reopens on 26 September with an exhibition marking the centenary of the outer precinct, so a Thursday-free itinerary is not enough on its own [meijijingu.or.jp museum notices]. - The famous Treasure Museum is not the museum you can visit. The 1921 hall, an Important Cultural Property since June 2011, opens only for limited announced periods; the imperial belongings have been in the new museum since October 2019 [meijijingu.or.jp Treasure Museum page]. - The omikuji here does not tell fortunes. Omigokoro draws on thirty poems by the enshrined emperor and empress with a commentary attached, and prints no luck ranking at all, unlike almost every other shrine box in Japan [meijijingu.or.jp visitor pages]. - Running, sport and professional photo shoots need permission, and the sanctuary may not be photographed. The shrine's posted rules also ban taking anything living, or any soil, leaf or nut, into or out of the forest, which is why the paths are fenced with rope rather than with signs [meijijingu.or.jp etiquette and visitor notices].

Most visitors arrive at the south entrance because it is the one the trains land on, and it is the right choice for a first visit: the great cypress torii, the barrel wall and the Inner Garden are all on that approach. The north and west entrances are quieter, and if you are walking on from the shrine rather than back to the same station they can save you the return leg.

Bicycles and motorcycles must be left in the parking areas at each entrance and may not be ridden inside. Wheelchairs are available free at the entrance to the grounds. Drivers should note two things the shrine states directly: you cannot enter by car at the south or west gates, only at Yoyogi-guchi, and the shrine asks that its address be entered into a car navigation system as Yoyogi 1-1-2 rather than its real postal address, because the real one sends cars to the wrong side of the forest.

Given the traffic, the trains are the answer here, as they are almost everywhere in this city.

The obvious sequence is shrine, then the streets outside it, then south. Be at the south entrance when the gates open, walk in, take the courtyard and the barrel wall, and add the Inner Garden if you are here between the end of May and the end of June. You will be back out by the time the shops on Takeshita Street raise their shutters, which is exactly the right order: one of those two places is ruined by crowds and the other is made of them.

From there it is a walk down Omotesando or twenty minutes south to the crossing, which is better after dark anyway.

Planning around the short winter day

Two practical notes for fitting it into a fixed itinerary. This shrine has no closed day, so it is a reliable answer on the day much of the city shuts; the Monday list sets out what else is open. And in winter the useful window is short, roughly six hours from gate to gate in December, so a shrine visit and a museum visit on the same short afternoon do not fit. The one-day itinerary places it first for that reason, and the full list of what to see marks which of the alternatives are timed.