The garden began in 1654 when Tokugawa Tsunashige, the third son of Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu and lord of Kofu Domain, received permission to reclaim land from Edo Bay. He built a villa and gardens on the newly created ground. His son, Tokugawa Ienobu, inherited the property and eventually became the sixth Tokugawa shogun, elevating the estate from a nobleman's retreat to a seat of power. Succeeding generations of shoguns used it as a secondary residence, and from the time of Tokugawa Ienari through Tokugawa Ieyoshi, the grounds served as a private falconry reserve. The main palace burned in 1724 and was never rebuilt, but the gardens kept growing, shaped by the tidal pulse of the bay. That salt water flowing through Shioiri-no-ike -- the central tidal pond -- is not an ornamental trick. It is the original design: a garden that breathes with the ocean.

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the estate was proclaimed an imperial detached palace by Emperor Meiji and repurposed as a state guest house. The garden hosted some of the era's most consequential meetings between Japan and the West. In 1879, Emperor Meiji received Crown Prince Frederick William of Germany -- the future Kaiser Frederick III -- at Hama-rikyu. Later that same year, former United States President Ulysses Grant stayed for a full month during his extended tour of Japan. Before that, in 1867, the Tokugawa shogunate had already erected a Western-style stone building on the grounds specifically to house foreign diplomats visiting Edo. The state guest house was eventually demolished in 1889 after the Rokumeikan, Tokyo's famous ballroom of Westernization, took over its diplomatic functions.

Hama-rikyu has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once. The gardens burned during the catastrophic 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which killed over 100,000 people across the Kanto region. They burned again in March 1945, during the firebombing raids that leveled much of Tokyo. In November 1945, the Imperial Household Agency transferred the grounds to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and the garden reopened to the public on April 1, 1946 -- less than a year after the war's end. In 1952, Hama-rikyu received dual designation as both a Special National Historic Site and a Special National Place of Scenic Beauty, one of only a handful of locations in Japan to hold both titles simultaneously. In the 2010s, several of the garden's historic teahouses were carefully reconstructed, returning the estate closer to its Edo-period appearance.

At the center of Shioiri-no-ike stands a teahouse reached by two wooden bridges. Visitors sit in the tea-ceremony style, sipping matcha and eating wagashi -- traditional Japanese sweets -- while looking out over water that rises and falls with Tokyo Bay. The garden surrounding the pond shifts with the seasons: peonies bloom in spring, plum trees flower in late winter, and fields of cosmos and rapeseed blaze yellow in their turn. Every New Year, the garden hosts demonstrations of traditional Japanese falconry and aikido, connecting the grounds back to the centuries when shoguns flew hawks from these same paths. Visitors can arrive by water bus from Asakusa, a 35-minute ride down the Sumida River that deposits passengers directly inside the garden walls -- the ticket includes admission.