Meiji Shrine
The forest comes first. Before the torii gate, before the gravel path, before the shrine buildings themselves, there is a wall of green so dense it swallows the noise of Shibuya and Harajuku whole. This is not an ancient woodland. Every one of the 120,000 trees was planted by hand starting in 1920, donated from all parts of Japan, selected by forestry scientists who planned not for decades but for centuries. The designers chose species that would mature into a self-sustaining ecosystem, one that would look untouched by human hands within a hundred years. They succeeded. Meiji Shrine, dedicated to the spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, is Tokyo's most sacred Shinto site -- and its forest is one of the most ambitious acts of ecological engineering in modern history.
A Nation Builds a Forest
Emperor Meiji died in 1912, and the Japanese Diet quickly resolved to create a memorial befitting the ruler who had presided over Japan's transformation from feudal isolation to industrial modernity. An iris garden in central Tokyo where the emperor and empress had been known to visit was chosen as the site. Construction began in 1915 under architect Ito Chuta, who designed the shrine in the traditional nagare-zukuri style using Japanese cypress and copper. But the shrine buildings were only part of the vision. Forestry experts Honda Seiroku and Kawase Zentaro were tasked with creating an entire forest from bare land. They mapped out a planting scheme where every tree was chosen based on how it would look not in ten years, but in one hundred or two hundred. Some 110,000 volunteers from across the country came to plant the donated trees. Materials arrived from every Japanese prefecture, with main timbers sourced from the Kiso Mountains in Nagano and the forests of Alishan in Taiwan.
Sake, Wine, and Sacred Ground
Walk the main approach and two sights stop visitors in their tracks: towers of wooden sake barrels on one side, stacked rows of Burgundy wine barrels from France on the other. The sake barrels represent offerings from breweries across Japan, a tradition of gifts to the shrine. The wine barrels honor Emperor Meiji's well-known appreciation for Western culture -- he was the ruler who opened Japan to the world, and he reportedly developed a taste for French wine. The juxtaposition captures the shrine's essential character: traditional Shinto reverence meeting Meiji-era cosmopolitanism. Beyond the barrels, the gravel path leads through a massive cypress torii gate into the shrine's inner courtyard, where priests and shrine maidens in traditional dress prepare for weddings and ceremonies throughout the year.
Destroyed and Reborn
The original shrine buildings did not survive World War II. During the devastating Tokyo air raids, the wooden cypress structures burned. The forest, however, endured. After the war, with Japan rebuilding from ruins, a nationwide fundraising campaign collected enough money to reconstruct the shrine. The present buildings were completed in October 1958, faithful to Ito Chuta's original nagare-zukuri design. Until 1946, Meiji Shrine had been officially designated a Kanpei-taisha -- a shrine of the first rank, directly supported by the government. That status ended with the postwar separation of religion and state, but the shrine's spiritual significance only deepened. Today it draws roughly three million visitors during the first three days of each new year for hatsumode, the traditional first shrine visit, making it the most visited shrine in all of Japan during the New Year period.
A Century-Old Experiment Bears Fruit
The forest now covers 70 hectares of central Tokyo, an astonishing expanse of green in one of the world's densest cities. What began as a carefully plotted grid of saplings has matured into something that genuinely resembles a primeval forest. The canopy has closed. The understory has filled in with ferns and shade-tolerant species. Birds and insects have colonized the habitat. The original planners designed the forest in three succession stages: fast-growing pioneer species first, then mid-canopy trees, then the climax species -- camphor, oak, and chinquapin -- that would eventually dominate. The plan worked almost exactly as predicted. Surveys have documented 234 different tree varieties thriving in what is essentially a manufactured ecosystem that has become self-sustaining, requiring no replanting, no irrigation, and minimal human intervention.
Seventy Hectares in the Heart of Tokyo
From the air, the shrine complex and its forest form one of the most striking features of central Tokyo: a dark green rectangle bounded by the bright urban grids of Shibuya to the south, Shinjuku to the north, and the open lawns of Yoyogi Park to the southwest. The contrast between the dense forest canopy and the surrounding cityscape is dramatic at any altitude. The shrine's inner garden, with its famous iris beds, is hidden beneath the trees and invisible from above. But the main torii gates, the wide gravel approaches, and the rooflines of the shrine buildings create visible geometric interruptions in the forest cover. The adjacent Meiji Jingu Gaien -- the outer garden -- adds sports facilities, a baseball stadium, and the famous ginkgo-lined avenue that extends the green corridor eastward toward Aoyama.
From the Air
Located at 35.676N, 139.699E in Shibuya, central Tokyo. The 70-hectare forest surrounding Meiji Shrine is one of the most distinctive features visible from altitude in central Tokyo -- a dark green rectangle sharply contrasting with the dense urban grid. Adjacent to Yoyogi Park to the southwest, creating a combined green space easily identified from above. The large torii gates and gravel approaches are visible at lower altitudes. Tokyo Haneda International Airport (RJTT) lies approximately 10 nautical miles to the south-southeast. Chofu Airport (RJTF) is roughly 10 nautical miles to the west. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet AGL to appreciate the forest's scale against the surrounding city.