American cultural geographer picks three favourite places to go in Greater Tokyo

Japan fas­cin­ates West­ern­ers with its rich tra­di­tions, hyper­mod­ern city­scapes, exquis­ite cuisine, and glob­al­ised pop culture.

With all of this packed into a mod­er­ately-sized coun­try where people are at once cos­mo­pol­it­an and polite, streets are safe, and train and bus sys­tems form an Eighth-Won­der-of-the-World mod­el of trans­port­a­tion effi­ciency, the siren call to travel to Japan becomes even more powerful.

Tour­ist web­sites list no short­age of “things to see and do” in the coun­try that are no doubt all worth see­ing and doing. But after vis­it­ing Japan — most often Tokyo — annu­ally over the last 20 years, I have made a per­son­al list of recom­mend­a­tions — places to go in Great­er Tokyo — that don’t always appear on these websites. 

The inside track

Ron Dav­id­son is a cul­tur­al geo­graph­er at Cali­for­nia State Uni­ver­sity, North­ridge, USA. His research focuses on pub­lic space in North Amer­ica and Japan.

He is also an author at The “Good Tour­ism” Blog.

In this “GT” Travel Exper­i­ence I will recom­mend three such places: 

(And don’t miss my get­ting around tip at the end, which will save you a lot of hassle.)

1. Ministry of Defense compound, Ichigaya

After World War II, the United States ghost-wrote a new con­sti­tu­tion for Japan that stripped the emper­or of polit­ic­al and mil­it­ary author­ity, made the coun­try a demo­cracy, and, in its fam­ous “peace clause”, for­bade Japan from hav­ing a military. 

Soon after the Con­sti­tu­tion went into effect in 1947, how­ever, fears of Com­mun­ist armies invad­ing east Asia promp­ted the US to rethink that com­mit­ment to peace. Exploit­ing a loop­hole, they allowed Japan to cre­ate a mil­it­ary clothed as the “Nation­al Police Reserve”. 

The Reserve evolved into today’s “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF), a soph­ist­ic­ated mil­it­ary but one Con­sti­tu­tion­ally con­strained to oper­ate only with­in Japan­ese ter­rit­ory. (Their main enemy has been, in movies, Godzilla.) 

Tour­ists can vis­it the SDF’s roughly 60-acre com­pound in Ichigaya, in cent­ral Tokyo, which fea­tures dis­plays of mil­it­ary equip­ment, facil­it­ies, and his­tor­ic buildings. 

The most strik­ing moment of the tour for me was enter­ing the build­ing that housed the former Min­istry of War and, in 1946, the Inter­na­tion­al Mil­it­ary Tribunal for the Far East (i.e. the Tokyo War Crimes Trials). 

Eer­ily, but fas­cin­at­ingly for a fan of his nov­els, the tour also included the room upstairs where the writer-cum-reac­tion­ary-mil­it­ant Yukio Mishi­ma attemp­ted a coup and then com­mit­ted sep­puku in 1970. 

You might want to pre­pare for this part of the tour by read­ing some of the works that garnered Mishi­ma five Nobel Prize nom­in­a­tions, or by watch­ing the George Lucas/Francis Ford Cop­pola-pro­duced movie Mishi­ma: A Life in Four Chapters before you go. 

Check the MOD web­site for details and to register for a tour in advance (if available). 

2. Showa Kinen Koen (‘Showa Memorial Park’), Tachikawa

Amer­ic­ans may dis­play a linger­ing anti-urb­an bias, roman­ti­cising rur­al life and opt­ing for sub­urb­an homes, but the Japan­ese embrace urban­ity. (They have little choice, with the pop­u­la­tion of 125 mil­lion squeezed into the moun­tain­ous country’s val­leys and plains.) 

Japan’s urb­an­ism is urb­an­ism squared, with the sig­na­ture Tokyo inter­sec­tions packed with ped­es­tri­ans under fren­et­ic neon sky­lines, trains whoosh­ing past on trestles, alley­ways throng­ing with shops and street vendors. 

In that con­text, any park is not­able simply for the solitude and green­ery it offers. Tokyo has many fam­ous parks and gar­dens, but a gem worth a bit of extra trav­el­ling to get to is Showa Kin­en Koen, 35 kilo­metres west of downtown. 

Built dur­ing the “golden era” of park cre­ation of the 1970s-80s in Japan, when the country’s eco­nom­ic cof­fers were over­flow­ing and the gov­ern­ment inves­ted heav­ily in park­land to serve dis­pers­ing met­ro­pol­it­an pop­u­la­tions, Showa Kin­en Koen is a lav­ish, 180-ha (445-acre) park meant to serve mul­tiple met­ro­pol­it­an areas. 

Designed to rep­res­ent the “ori­gin­al” land­scape of the Musashino plain, the park offers end­lessly delight­ful explor­a­tion through a forest, “komorebi” (sun-dappled) hills, expans­ive flower beds, around a lake, and into a “vil­lage” of 1950s-era farm build­ings around func­tion­ing rice paddies. 

Most impress­ive to me is the award-win­ning “Children’s Forest”, which occu­pies a Lewis-Car­roll-ish space of its own. 

This area fea­tures a half-bur­ied May­an temple, mists that rise from hid­den grates, dragons that swim out of the ground, and more that kids and adults alike will love. Fire­works light up the sky on sum­mer evenings. 

Inter­est­ingly, urb­an-explorer sleuths sug­gest that beneath Showa Kin­en Koen is a vast, secret net­work of tun­nels and spaces meant to house the gov­ern­ment in case of a dis­aster. That pos­sib­il­ity extends the park’s above-ground fantasy into sub­ter­ranean “what-if” space. 

The adja­cent Tachi­kawa shop­ping dis­trict is crammed with res­taur­ants and shops to explore as well.

3. ‘The Low City’, Kikuzaka

In his out­stand­ing book, Tokyo: A Spa­tial Anthro­po­logy, urb­an­ist Jin­nai Hiden­obu notes that Tokyo was nev­er “Hauss­man­nized”, or giv­en a large-scale mod­ern­ist makeover. 

It was, instead, rebuilt more typ­ic­ally lot by lot. 

Thus he writes of pla­cing a his­tor­ic map of Edo (Tokyo’s early-mod­ern incarn­a­tion) atop one of mod­ern Tokyo and find­ing that, beneath its skin of mod­ern struc­tures, many Tokyo neigh­bour­hoods retain dis­tinct­ive spa­tial pat­terns that were estab­lished cen­tur­ies ago. 

Jin­nai tours the read­er through sev­er­al former high and low (elite and com­mon­er) areas. 

I fol­lowed Jinnai’s lead and vis­ited the Kikuza­ka neigh­bour­hood in Hongo, formerly part of the low city. Here com­mon­ers lived in row houses sep­ar­ated by nar­row alley­ways, or kais­ho, that formed micro-social worlds with­in what was by the 1700s per­haps already the world’s largest city. 

Kikuza­ka’s alleys are densely human­ised with gar­dens, wells, and small shrines. Such were the pub­lic spaces of Edo; not a city of grand plazas, parks, and boulevards, but of small, hid­den, social worlds. 

Getting around

A tip: It’s a good idea to study Toky­o’s trans­port­a­tion net­work, and work out your routes, before you begin your trip. The sys­tem is a strin­gozzi-galaxy of mul­tiple, sep­ar­ate bus and train net­works that over­lap into a truly colossal mega system. 

The maps on the walls of Tokyo metro sta­tions resemble Jack­son Pol­lock-inspired mur­als, but you won’t want to indulge in art appre­ci­ation amidst the hec­tic crowds and busy timetables. You’ll want to have a sol­id plan of how to get from A to B. 

Doing some home­work before­hand, and buy­ing a PASMO card that works across mul­tiple sys­tems, is a good idea.

Con­tents ^

Read more “GT” Travel Exper­i­ences in Asia

Featured pic (top of post)

Places to go in Great­er Tokyo include Showa Kin­en Koen. Pic by Norikio Yamamoto (CC0) via Unsplash.

Where is this?

The pin on the “GT” Travel map that rep­res­ents this “GT” Travel Exper­ence points to Showa Kin­en Koen (“Showa Memori­al Park”) in Tachi­kawa, west­ern Tokyo.

Where next?