10 Best Sights in Tokyo, Japan

This shrine honors the spirits of Emperor Meiji, who died in 1912, and Empress Shoken. It was established by a resolution of the Imperial Diet the year after the emperor's death to commemorate his role in ending the long isolation of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and setting the country on the road to modernization. Virtually destroyed in an air raid in 1945, it was rebuilt in 1958.

A wonderful spot for photos, the mammoth entrance gates (torii), rising 40 feet high, are made from 1,700-year-old cypress trees from Mt. Ari in Taiwan; the crosspieces are 56 feet long. Torii are meant to symbolize the separation of the everyday secular world from the spiritual world of the Shinto shrine. The buildings in the shrine complex, with their curving, green, copper roofs, are also made of cypress wood. The surrounding gardens have some 100,000 flowering shrubs and trees.

An annual festival at the shrine takes place on November 3, Emperor Meiji's birthday, which is a national holiday. On the festival and New Year's Day, as many as 1 million people come to offer prayers and pay their respects. Several other festivals and ceremonial events are held here throughout the year; check by phone or on the shrine website to see what's scheduled during your visit. Even on a normal weekend the shrine draws thousands of visitors, but this seldom disturbs its mood of quiet serenity.

The peaceful Meiji Jingu Gardens (Meiji Jingu Gyoen), where the irises are in full bloom in the latter half of June, is on the left as you walk in from the main gates, before you reach the shrine. Designed by Kengo Kuma, the architect behind Tokyo's new Olympic stadium, the Meiji Jingu Museum displays personal effects and clothes of Emperor and Empress Meiji—perhaps of less interest to foreign visitors than to the Japanese.

This shrine, built in 1627, is dedicated to Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun. It miraculously survived all major disasters that destroyed most of Tokyo's historical structures—the fires, the 1868 revolt, the 1923 earthquake, the 1945 bombings—making it one of the few early-Edo-period buildings left in Tokyo. The shrine and most of its art are designated National Treasures.

Two hundred ishidoro (stone lanterns) line the path from the stone entry arch to the shrine itself. One of them, just outside the arch to the left, and more than 18 feet high, is called obaketoro (ghost lantern). Legend has it that one night a samurai on guard duty slashed at a ghost (obake) that was believed to haunt the lantern. His sword was so strong, it left a nick in the stone, which can be seen today.

The first room inside the shrine is the Hall of Worship; the four paintings in gold on wooden panels are by Tan'yu, a member of the famous Kano family of artists, dating from the 15th century. Behind the Hall of Worship, connected by a passage called the haiden, is the sanctuary, where the spirit of Ieyasu is said to be enshrined.

The real glory of Tosho-gu is its so-called Chinese Gate, at the end of the building, and the fence on either side that has intricate carvings of birds, animals, fish, and shells of every description. The two long panels of the gate, with their dragons carved in relief, are attributed to Hidari Jingoro, a brilliant sculptor of the early Edo period whose real name is unknown (hidari means "left"; Jingoro was reportedly left-handed).

Several structures in the famous Senso-ji shrine complex survived the bombings of 1945. The largest, to the right of the Main Hall, is this Shinto shrine to the Hikonuma brothers and their master, Najino-Nakamoto—the putative founders of Senso-ji. In Japan, Buddhism and Shintoism have enjoyed a comfortable coexistence since the former arrived from China in the 6th century. The shrine, built in 1649, is also known as Sanja Sama (Shrine of the Three Guardians). Near the entrance to Asakusa Shrine is another survivor of World War II: the original east gate to the temple grounds, Niten-mon, built in 1618 for a shrine to Ieyasu Tokugawa and designated by the government as an Important Cultural Property.

Located northeast of Kawagoe’s central sightseeing area (you’ll want to get on the loop bus rather than walk), Hikawa is known as a shrine where people come to pray for love and marital happiness. To do that yourself, write a wish on an ema (small votive plaque) and then hang it in the extremely Instagrammable ema tunnel. There are also two 600-year-old zelkova trees on the grounds, wedded together by an ornately wound rope. It’s said that walking around these giant trees in a figure of eight pattern also bestows good fortune.

This shrine is said to have been founded in AD 730 in a village called Shibasaki, where the Otemachi financial district stands today. The shrine itself was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and the present buildings reproduce in concrete the style of 1616. Next door is the Edo Culture Complex, where you check in for your visit and can see cultural displays on the era when Samurai flourished.

You will never be able to see every shrine in the city, and the ones in Akihabara are of minor interest unless you are around for the Kanda Festival—one of Tokyo's three great blowouts—in mid-May. (The other two are the Sanno Festival of Hie Jinja in Nagata-cho and the Sanja Festival of Asakusa Shrine.) Some of the smaller buildings you see as you come up the steps and walk around the Main Hall contain the mikoshi—the portable shrines that are featured during the festival.

Built in the mid-1600s to house and honor a Shinto spirit that calmed the waters of Tokyo Bay, this little shrine is worth a stop on your way to Tsukiji Outer Market. The name of the shrine literally means "protection from waves," and it is an unofficial guardian shrine for the marketplace and its workers.

The tiny hillock Benten-yama, with its shrine to the goddess of good fortune, is the site of this 17th-century belfry. The bell here used to toll the hours for the people of the district, and it was said that you could hear it anywhere within a radius of some 6 km (4 miles). The bell still sounds at 6 am every day, when the temple grounds open. It also rings on New Year's Eve—108 strokes in all, beginning just before midnight, to "ring out" the 108 sins and frailties of humankind and make a clean start for the coming year. Benten-yama and the belfry are at the beginning of the narrow street that parallels Nakamise-dori.

This shrine in the heart of Monzen-Nakacho has been a core part of Fukagawa since the 1600s. It’s said that some of the earliest sumo tournaments were held here in the 1700s, which explains the sumo-related monuments dotted around the place. Today, the grounds hold small antiques markets on the first, second, third, and fifth Sundays of each month, while lively flea markets take place on the 15th and 28th of each month. In odd-numbered years, the shrine is also the starting point of the summer Fukagawa Hachiman Matsuri, a festival that sees more than 50 portable shrines paraded energetically through the streets while onlookers pour buckets of water over the carriers (and each other). One more quirk here is that you can bring your car to be blessed.

Founded in 1869, this shrine is dedicated to approximately 2½ million Japanese, Taiwanese, and Koreans who have died since then in war or military service. As the Japanese constitution expressly renounces both militarism and state sponsorship of religion, Yasukuni has been a center of stubborn political debate, particularly since 1978 when a shrine official added the names of several class-A war criminals to the list. Numerous prime ministers have visited the shrine since 1979, causing a political chill between Japan and its close neighbors, Korea and China, who suffered under Japanese colonialism. Despite all this, hundreds of thousands of Japanese come here every year, simply to pray for the repose of friends and relatives they have lost. These pilgrimages are most frenzied on August 15, the anniversary of the conclusion of World War II, when former soldiers and ultra-right-wing groups descend upon the shrine's grounds en masse.

The shrine is not one structure but a complex of buildings that include the Main Hall and the Hall of Worship—both built in the simple, unadorned style of the ancient Shinto shrines at Ise—and the Yushukan, a museum of documents and war memorabilia. Also here are a Noh theater and, in the far western corner, a sumo-wrestling ring. Sumo matches are held at Yasukuni in April, during the first of its three annual festivals. You can pick up a pamphlet and simplified map of the shrine, both in English, just inside the grounds.

Refurbished in 2002, the Yushukan presents Japan at its most ambivalent—if not unrepentant—about its more recent militaristic past. Critics charge that the newer exhibits glorify the nation's role in the Pacific War as a noble struggle for independence; certainly there's an agenda here that's hard to reconcile with Japan's firm postwar rejection of militarism as an instrument of national policy. Many Japanese visitors are moved by such displays as the last letters and photographs of young kamikaze pilots, while others find the Yushukan a cautionary, rather than uplifting, experience.

Although some of the exhibits have English labels and notes, the English is not very helpful; most objects, however, speak clearly enough for themselves. Rooms on the second floor house an especially fine collection of medieval swords and armor. Visiting on a Sunday offers a chance to forage at the flea market that runs from morning until sundown.

The origins of this shrine date to a hall, founded in 1632, for the study of the Chinese Confucian classics. Its headmaster was Hayashi Razan, the official Confucian scholar to the Tokugawa government. Moved to its present site in 1691 (and destroyed by fire and rebuilt six times), the hall became an academy for the ruling elite. In a sense, nothing has changed: in 1872 the new Meiji government established the country's first teacher-training institute here, and that, in turn, evolved into Tokyo University—the graduates of which still make up much of the ruling elite. The hall looks like nothing else you're likely to see in Japan: painted black, weathered, and somber, it could almost be in China.