Famous Landmarks in Tokyo
A capital rebuilt in steel and brick after fire and bombing, not preserved intact.
The city's most visited structures cluster in three different eras and districts rather than one historic core. Sensō-ji, in Asakusa, is a Buddhist temple complex whose main hall and pagoda were rebuilt in the 1950s after wartime destruction, keeping a seventh-century foundation in essentially postwar materials. Tokyo Station, in Chiyoda near the Imperial Palace, is a brick terminus from 1914 built in a European revivalist style, with later additions in a plainer postmodern idiom on its eastern side. Tokyo Tower, in Minato, is a white-and-orange steel lattice broadcasting mast from the late 1950s, built for television and radio rather than sightseeing. Together they show a capital rebuilt repeatedly rather than preserved intact.
Senso-ji
645–1950s
A temple complex built around a main hall and a five-story pagoda, entered through large gates and a covered lane of shops selling traditional goods, with a separate Shinto shrine standing immediately beside it.
Founded in 645, this is the city's oldest Buddhist temple and one of its most important, dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. It is the most visited religious site in the world, drawing more than 30 million visitors a year, and forms the thirteenth stop on a regional pilgrimage route. Firebombing on 10 March 1945 destroyed the complex during the war, and the main hall was rebuilt in the 1950s. Formerly tied to the Tendai school of Buddhism, it became independent in 1950. A Shinto shrine stands immediately beside it, and a lane of traditional shops leads to its gates.
- It draws more than 30 million visitors a year, making it the most visited religious site in the world.
- It is the thirteenth stop on a regional Buddhist pilgrimage route.
Photo: Joli Rumi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Imperial Palace
1868–1968 · Junzo Yoshimura
Broad moats and massive stone ramparts from the original fortress enclose a low, wood-toned palace complex with deep tiled roofs, set within landscaped gardens rather than presented as a single freestanding building.
This walled complex occupies the site of the former Edo Castle, becoming the emperor's residence in 1869. Most of its Meiji-era buildings, including a grand audience hall larger than any other in the compound, burned down in an Allied firebombing raid in May 1945. A new main palace hall, designed by Junzo Yoshimura, was built between 1964 and 1968 in traditional style using mostly domestic materials, and a separate residence by Shōzō Uchii followed in 1993. Part of the former grounds opened to the public as a garden in 1968.
- On two separate occasions, in 2008 and 2013, tourists stripped and swam across the palace moat trying to avoid arrest or sneak inside.
- The wooden double bridges over the moat, once called Nijūbashi, were later rebuilt in stone and iron.
- The pre-war audience hall's floor space measured more than 737 square meters before it was destroyed in 1945.
Photo: Chris 73 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
National Diet Building
1920–1936 · Ministry of the Treasury
A symmetrical stone building with a stepped, pyramid-shaped tower rising from its center between two matching wings, one on either side of the main entrance.
Plans for this building dated back to the 1880s, but two earlier wooden structures on the site burned down, in 1891 and 1925, before construction of the present building began in 1920. A 1918 design competition drew 118 entries, and the winning floor plan underlies the finished structure, completed in 1936. It was built entirely of Japanese materials except for its stained glass, door locks and pneumatic tube system. Its central tower reaches 65.45 meters, briefly surpassing a department store as the tallest building in the area.
- The central entrance is nicknamed "the door that never opens" because it is used only for rare ceremonial occasions.
- Three statues of Meiji-era statesmen stand in the central hall's corners, but the fourth pedestal has always stood empty for reasons nobody has settled.
- The four seasonal paintings on the central hall's stained-glass ceiling were painted by art students rather than established artists.
Photo: 663highland (CC BY 2.5)
Dome
1985–1988 · Takenaka Corporation
A stadium topped by a smooth, rounded white dome kept aloft purely by internal air pressure, giving it an egg-like silhouette that led to an early nickname referencing that shape.
Construction began in 1985 on the site of a velodrome, replacing the open-air Korakuen Stadium as home of the Yomiuri Giants; the earlier ballpark's site is now a hotel and plaza. Developed jointly by Nikken Sekkei and Takenaka Corporation and modeled on the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, the stadium opened in 1988 with a fiberglass membrane roof supported entirely by pressurized interior air. It holds up to 57,000 people and has hosted Major League Baseball season openers, world baseball tournaments, and Japan's Baseball Hall of Fame.
- Its 0.8-millimeter fiberglass membrane roof is held up entirely by pressurizing the stadium's interior air, with no rigid supporting frame.
- It was nicknamed "the Big Egg" for the shape of its dome.
- Games played here between the Chicago Cubs and New York Mets in 2000 were the first Major League Baseball regular-season games held in Asia.
Photo: Carpkazu at Japanese Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Zōjō-ji
1393–1974
A weathered two-story wooden gate, centuries older than everything around it, stands before a rebuilt great hall, with a tall broadcasting tower rising immediately behind the temple grounds.
Founded in 1393 when its abbot converted the temple from the Shingon to the Jōdo school, this became one of two family temples of the Tokugawa shoguns, moving to its present site in 1590. Six of the fifteen shoguns are buried in a mausoleum here. Its two-story Sangedatsumon gate, built in 1622, is the oldest wooden building in the city and the only original structure to survive wartime bombing; the adjoining great hall was destroyed and rebuilt in 1974. A gallery beneath it, opened in 2015, displays temple treasures.
- The Sangedatsumon gate's name refers to freeing whoever passes through it from three passions: greed, hatred, and foolishness.
- The temple's Treasure Gallery displays a 1/10-scale model of a shogun's mausoleum destroyed in the war, alongside scrolls of 500 Buddhist arhats that survived a fire that destroyed the hall built to house them.
- A section of the temple garden holds rows of small stone statues representing miscarried, aborted, and stillborn children, which parents decorate with clothing and toys.
Photo: Andreas Tack (CC BY-SA 3.0)
History
Tokyo began as Edo, a fishing town that became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603 and grew into one of the world's largest cities under two and a half centuries of military rule. Long before that, Buddhist worship had already taken root at Sensō-ji, founded in 645 in what is now Asakusa. The built environment visible today owes more to the twentieth century than to Edo: American bombing raids in 1945 destroyed Sensō-ji's halls and damaged the railway terminus at Tokyo Station, both later rebuilt. Postwar reconstruction also produced Tokyo Tower, raised in 1958 as a shared broadcasting mast for the city's television and radio stations. Reconstruction and repair, more than survival, explain why so much of the city's fabric reads as mid-century rather than ancient.