Garden
Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden
11 Naitōmachi, Shinjuku City, Tokyo 160-0014
Sprawling Meiji-era garden blending Japanese, French and English styles around a tranquil pond.
This guide to Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo follows the garden's tangled royal history, from a feudal lord's estate granted by shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1590, through its rebirth as an imperial botanical garden reshaped by French landscape architect Henri Martinet around 1900. It lingers on a wooden pavilion built as a 1927 wedding gift for the future Emperor Hirohito. Listen for the plane trees planted in stiff French rows against the looser curve of the pond, laid out by that same architect.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.