For generations of Japanese arriving in Tokyo from the northern prefectures, Ueno Station was the city's front door. It served as the terminus for long-distance services including the famed Blue Train sleeper cars and, later, the Tohoku Shinkansen. Families from Akita, Aomori, and Sendai stepped off trains here and got their first taste of the capital. That role as a gateway shaped Ueno's character -- the district developed to serve travelers, with cheap accommodations, market stalls, and the particular energy of a neighborhood that exists to receive newcomers. Even after the Shinkansen lines were extended south to Tokyo Station in the 1990s, Ueno retained its identity as an arrival point, its wide station plaza still carrying echoes of the era when this was where the countryside met the metropolis.

On July 4, 1868, pro-Imperial forces attacked Shogitai loyalists barricaded at Kan'ei-ji, the great Buddhist temple that once dominated the hilltop above Ueno. The Battle of Ueno was brief but destructive -- most of the temple complex was reduced to rubble. In the aftermath, the Meiji government converted the ruined temple grounds into one of Japan's first public parks. Today, Ueno Park stretches from behind the University of Tokyo's Hongo Campus to the edge of Shinobazu Pond, a lotus-covered lake with a small island temple dedicated to the goddess Benzaiten. Within the park's borders stand the Tokyo National Museum, housing the world's largest collection of Japanese art; the National Museum of Nature and Science; a Le Corbusier-designed building for the National Museum of Western Art; Ueno Zoo, Japan's oldest; and the five-story pagoda of Kan'ei-ji, now inside the zoo grounds -- a remnant of the temple that once ruled the hill.

South of the station, beneath the elevated rail tracks, Ameya-yokocho -- "Candy Alley" -- runs for about 500 meters toward Okachimachi. The name comes from the sweet-potato candy vendors who set up shop here after World War II, alongside a black market selling American goods during the occupation years. The market never fully gentrified. Today it is a dense corridor of stalls selling fresh fish, dried goods, cosmetics, leather goods, and imported clothing at aggressive discounts, with hawkers calling out prices to passersby. The energy is distinctly un-Tokyo: loud, crowded, slightly rough around the edges. This is Shitamachi at its most unfiltered, a reminder that the working-class culture of Edo's eastern lowlands -- with its own dialect, its own food traditions, and its own stubborn sense of identity -- persists beneath the polished surface of modern Tokyo.

Despite the battle damage of 1868, Ueno retains a remarkable density of religious sites. Kan'ei-ji, though much diminished, still operates within the park. Nearby stands Ueno Toshogu, a gold-leaf Shinto shrine dating to 1627 that honors Tokugawa Ieyasu and two other shoguns. The Bentendo temple sits on its island in Shinobazu Pond, dedicated to Benzaiten, the Buddhist-Shinto deity of water, music, and eloquence. These shrines and temples coexist with the district's secular energy -- the museum crowds, the market noise, the streams of commuters -- in a way that captures something essential about Tokyo itself: the sacred and the commercial occupying the same ground, neither one disturbing the other, both carrying centuries of accumulated meaning beneath their surfaces.