Hey, cherry tree! Over here! Smile!

Kourakuen is a beautiful walled garden in the middle of Tokyo. We happened to be nearby and went in as it was opening at 9 am on Saturday, and I would not recommend going a minute later. We followed a cluster of older people towing cameras and clambering at the gate to get in. (It's 300 yen, 150 for these keen seniors.) A dozen of them bum rushed a weeping cherry tree, practically elbowing each other for the best shot. Of a tree. It is unlikely that anyone got a picture that didn't have three other photographers in it.

The garden is lovely and seems to go on and on, with steep winding steps, a plum orchard, stone ruins, and even a small rice field. A note at the front says the garden was built in the 1600s (with help from a Chinese "refugee scholar") and is now only a quarter of its original size. A wooden map shows it in its contemporary setting and it seems like the rest of the garden was probably where the Tokyo Dome and Spa LaQua are now. Office buildings, the dome, and LaQua's Thunder Dolphin roller coaster poke up above the trees. Although we could hear traffic and kids shouting during a baseball game, it's easy to imagine the garden itself much unchanged for the last four hundred years.

Except for the photographers. If it seemed amusingly over-photographed at 9 am, by 11 it was most uncharmingly like downtown rush hour and I would not be surprised if a grandmother or a peace-sign posing tourist was bumped right off a narrow walkway into one of the the murky, koi-infested ponds.

I think this would be a wonderful place to go throughout the year and see how it changes with Japan's four seasons.* Everyone should visit. Just not all at once, okay?


*I have been told many times that Japan has four seasons, often in the way that you might expect to be told that Japan has x-ray vision or some other enviable, unattainable super power. I am sure that most Japanese people realize that other countries also enjoy the blessing of having four seasons. But a few do not, and will eye you, when you claim that you do, first with suspicion and then with pity.
Koishikawa Kourakuen is near at least three stations: lots of lines including the Oedo at Kourakuen, and the JR Chuo at Suidobashi and Iidabashi. The nearest Iidabashi entrance has a facade that sort of looks like a huge impressionist metal locust diving into the ground. Sort of. It might look like something else entirely to you.

When you look at the map, can't you imagine the garden filling in all the space within 434?