Visiting Meiji Shrine in Tokyo

I’ve walked from Harajuku Station to Meiji Shrine maybe fifteen times now, and I still get the slight vertigo of it. You spend five minutes weaving through the teenage crowds on Takeshita Street. Then you cross one road. Then you walk through a 12-metre-tall wooden gate. And suddenly you’re standing in what feels like deep countryside, with gravel underfoot and nothing but trees in every direction.

This is the best trick Tokyo has up its sleeve. If you only have one morning to see a Japanese shrine on your whole Japan trip, I’d send you here. Not because Meiji Jingu is the oldest or the most photogenic on a postcard — it’s neither — but because the walk in tells you something about Tokyo that you can’t get anywhere else in the city.

First, the confession

The first time I ever came here, I bowed at the wrong gate. There are several torii on the way in, and I’d read that you’re meant to bow at the first one. So I bowed at the first one I saw. It was not the main entrance torii. It was a gate at a side path. A very kind elderly Japanese couple watched me do it with the blank politeness of people who’d just seen a tourist get very enthusiastic about a tree.

Nobody is going to stop you if you don’t bow. Nobody is going to correct you if you do it slightly wrong. That’s kind of the point of Meiji Shrine — it’s public space, and the rituals are quiet, and you can take them as seriously or as lightly as you like. I like them more now than I did the first time. But I also like being told what to do, and this article is about to do a lot of that.

Getting there (and which station to use)

Two stations put you right at the south entrance of Meiji Shrine, which is the one you want:

• Harajuku Station on the JR Yamanote Line. Take the Omotesando Exit — turn left out of the gates and you’ll see the torii within 60 seconds. This is the exit used on the JR East route maps.
• Meiji-jingumae Station on the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda and Fukutoshin Lines. Exit 2 is closest.

From either station it’s a 10-minute walk on flat ground through the forest path to the main hall. Strollers and wheelchairs are fine — the gravel is packed hard and the whole route is step-free until you reach the shrine courtyard itself.

There’s also a northern entrance near Yoyogi Station, which almost nobody uses. If you’re coming from Shinjuku, you could walk through Yoyogi Park and enter from the north — it takes longer but gives you the whole park in one go. I’ve only done this once. It felt pleasantly smug.

The forest was planted by volunteers

Here is the thing I tell people most often about Meiji Shrine, because it reliably makes them go oh.

The forest around the shrine looks ancient. It feels ancient. You will walk under cedars that tower 20 metres above your head and assume they’ve been there for a thousand years. They haven’t. The entire forest was planted by hand, in 1915-1920, using around 100,000 trees donated from every prefecture in Japan and a few from Taiwan and Korea. About 110,000 young volunteers did the actual planting.

The intention was to design a forest that would eventually look wild — to pick species and spacings so that by the year 2050 or so, the planted rows would be invisible and the whole thing would look like it had been there forever. It’s already there, a hundred years ahead of schedule. The biologists and landscape architects who planned it got their maths slightly wrong in the best possible direction.

This is why the trees feel the way they feel. The whole grove exists because a lot of people, a century ago, decided it should.

Sake barrels. And, surprisingly, French wine barrels.

About halfway along the path to the main hall, you’ll pass a wall of colourful barrels, stacked three high and running on for maybe 40 metres. These are sake barrels donated each year by breweries across Japan. In Shinto, rice wine is literally called miki, “alcohol of the gods”, and this tradition of brewery donations is old and nationwide.

What you might miss is the other wall. Walk on about thirty seconds and look left. There’s a smaller stack of wooden casks. These are Burgundy wine barrels, donated from France.

This is the part of Meiji Shrine that actually surprises you. Emperor Meiji, who this whole place is dedicated to, was the emperor who dragged Japan from 200 years of isolation into the modern world. He opened the country to foreign trade in 1868. He wore Western suits. He drank Burgundy. When he died in 1912 and the shrine was built to honour him, the French wine houses asked if they could keep offering casks in his memory. They’re still doing it.

I’ve taken maybe eight friends to Meiji Shrine. Not one of them noticed the wine barrels until I pointed them out. Pay attention.

The hand-washing bit, and why I did it wrong

Before you approach the main hall, you’re supposed to stop at the temizuya — the covered fountain with the long wooden ladles. This is where you symbolically purify yourself. It’s a short ritual and I did every single step of it wrong the first time.

Here’s the actual sequence:

1. Pick up the ladle with your right hand.
2. Pour water over your left hand.
3. Switch the ladle to your left hand. Pour water over your right.
4. Switch back to your right hand. Pour a little water into your cupped left hand.
5. Rinse your mouth from the cupped hand — do not drink from the ladle, which is what I did. Spit the water onto the gravel beside the fountain, not back into the basin.
6. Tilt the ladle up so the remaining water runs down the handle (this cleans the handle for the next person). Put it back, face-down, on the rack.

If this all feels like too much, at least do hands. Nobody is checking. If you forget what to do, stand to the side and watch the quiet middle-aged women who come here regularly — they do it fast and without thinking and you can follow along.

The main hall and how to actually pray

At the main hall, you’ll see an offering box — a long wooden slatted box, with a thick rope hanging above it ending in a bell. Here’s what to do:

1. Drop a coin into the box. A 5-yen coin is traditional — the word for five yen (go-en) sounds like the word for good fortune. If you don’t have a 5-yen coin, any coin is fine. Nobody is grading you.
2. Ring the bell once by tugging the rope.
3. Bow twice, deeply.
4. Clap twice.
5. Hold your hands together and make your wish silently.
6. Bow once more.

This is called ni-hai ni-hakushu ippai — “two bows, two claps, one bow”. It’s the same at any Shinto shrine you visit in Japan, so you’re learning a skill that travels.

Two small things to notice once you’re in the courtyard. First, the pair of enormous camphor trees on the left — they have thick straw ropes tied around their trunks. These are meoto kusu, “husband-and-wife trees”, and people visit them to pray for good relationships. Second, the ema — the small wooden plaques hanging in racks around the courtyard. Anyone can write a wish on one for ¥500 and hang it.

The Inner Garden (Meiji Jingu Gyoen)

This is the bit most people skip, which is exactly why you should do it. The Inner Garden (Meiji Jingu Gyoen) is a separate walled section of the grounds, charged at ¥500 to enter, and about 70% of visitors walk straight past the ticket booth.

What’s inside:

• An iris garden that peaks in mid-June. About 150 varieties of iris are planted in rows in a shallow water meadow. Emperor Meiji reportedly designed the layout himself for Empress Shoken. This is the only time the Inner Garden gets busy — if you’re in Tokyo in June, go early.
• Kiyomasa’s Well, a small spring that’s become a “power spot” — people queue briefly to fill bottles and take selfies. The well is about 400 years old, pre-dating the shrine by centuries, and is named after a warlord who supposedly dug it.
• A small teahouse by a pond. Lotus flowers in summer.

Even outside iris season, the garden is worth the ¥500 for the quiet alone. I’ve been here on a Saturday afternoon when the main shrine was packed and counted eleven people in the garden. Eleven.

The museum (worth it if you like calligraphy)

The Meiji Jingu Museum opened in 2019. It was designed by Kengo Kuma, the architect who also did the new National Stadium for the Tokyo Olympics. Entry is ¥1000, and the main draw is the collection of Emperor Meiji’s personal effects — his writing desk, clothes, and the horse-drawn carriage he rode to promulgate the 1889 Meiji Constitution.

Skip if you’re not into historical objects. Don’t skip if you are — the carriage is genuinely moving as an artefact.

Hours: 10:00 to 16:30, entry until 16:00. Closed Thursdays.

When to come

Meiji Shrine is one of those places where when matters more than what. Here’s how I’d rank the options.

8am on a weekday: the winner. The shrine opens with sunrise — exact times change monthly, but by 8am you’ll be in. The forest path is nearly empty, the air smells like wet cedar, and you’ll hear actual birds. This is what Meiji Shrine is for.

Saturday or Sunday, late morning: you might catch a Shinto wedding procession. The bride in white silk, priests in black silk, the whole procession walking very slowly across the main courtyard under a red umbrella. It’s not performed for tourists, but photography is fine if you’re respectful and stand to the side. Saturdays are most common.

1 January — New Year’s Day: don’t. Unless you want to. Meiji Shrine receives around three million visitors over the first three days of the year for hatsumode, the first shrine visit of the year. The queue wraps around the grounds. It is impressive, but it is also a very specific experience and not a good general shrine visit.

Mid-June: iris season. Inner Garden is the main event — pay the ¥500 and go.

Cherry blossom season (late March, early April): there are cherry trees at Meiji Shrine but it isn’t a hanami destination. If you want sakura, go to Shinjuku Gyoen or Yoyogi Park. Meiji Shrine looks best in its deep green full leaf anyway — try May or September-October.

Practical info at a glance

• Entry to the main shrine: free, every day of the year
• Hours: opens at sunrise, closes at sunset (changes monthly — check the official Meiji Jingu site for the current month’s opening times)
• Inner Garden (Meiji Jingu Gyoen): ¥500, 9:00 to 16:30 (until 16:00 from November to February), extended during iris season in mid-June
• Meiji Jingu Museum: ¥1,000, 10:00 to 16:30 (entry until 16:00), closed Thursdays
• Accessibility: gravel paths are flat and step-free to the main courtyard. Museum is fully wheelchair accessible.
• Restrooms: just inside the south gate (to the left after the first torii) and near the main hall
• Cafe and shop: the Forest Terrace Meiji Jingu complex sits between the south gate and the main approach — has a reasonable lunch restaurant, coffee, and a souvenir shop selling proper things rather than tourist tat
• Photography: fine everywhere outside. No flash inside the main hall. Do not photograph weddings without checking first.

What I do when I have a full day

If you want to make a morning of it, the route I’d recommend:

1. Arrive at Harajuku Station around 8:30am
2. Walk in via the south gate. Sake barrels, wine barrels, temizuya, main hall — 60-75 minutes
3. Inner Garden — 30-45 minutes
4. Exit via the same south gate around 10:30am, before the real crowds arrive
5. Walk five minutes to Takeshita Street in Harajuku for an aggressively different mood — rainbow cotton candy, plastic maid-cafe touts, teenage fashion
6. Lunch in Shibuya, a 15-minute walk south

Meiji Shrine + Harajuku + Shibuya is the cleanest introduction to Tokyo’s whole personality that you can do in one morning. Silence, then chaos, then efficient chaos. If you only have one day in Tokyo — and you really shouldn’t, but if you do — this is the morning I’d build it around.

If you want even more green, walk north into Shinjuku Gyoen another day. Different character, wider sky, more formal gardens. Meiji Shrine has the trees; Gyoen has the lawns. Both deserve time.