What's done is done. But what if a historic negotiation over the surrender of Edo Castle between Saigo Takamori, who led the Imperial forces during the fall of Edo, and Katsu Kaishu, the shogunate's ...

Forget the cherry blossoms and the flashy Tokyo hotels, because starting this April, for the first time ever, it’s possible to rent out an Edo period castle in the heart of Japan—and get the ...

Naotake Odake, former managing director of the Japan Tourist Bureau (JTB) and once director of the Tokyo Convention and Visitors Bureau, spent years of his professional life traveling to cities across ...

The Zen temple Zenshōan in the Yanaka district of Tokyo has long been a place of reflection for the political elite, including several prime ministers. The second installment of this two-part series ...

Originally Akasaka-mitsuke ("Mitsuke" means "look-out" or "guard post") was the location in Tokyo of a gate in the outer wall of Edo Castle, with a moat along the foot of the wall. Remnants of the ...

For more than two hundred years there was a megacity in Japan that almost no one from outside the country had ever seen. Edo, capital of the Tokugawa shoguns, began as a minor castle town around 1600 ...

TOKYO -- Stone walls from the Edo Castle thought to date back about 400 years, the oldest still existing from the structure, have been discovered at the renovation site of a museum at the Imperial ...

Four centuries ago, Tokyo was a small village perched on a narrow strip of land bordering an inlet from the bay. The city has been nearly wiped out several times only to revive with greater vigor than ...

With November drawing to a close, I head to the East Garden of the Imperial Palace and the adjacent Kitanomaru Koen park, hoping for fall colors and a mental breather before the season goes ...

A number of reinforced-concrete castle towers that were erected during the castle-building and restoration boom in the Showa era (1926-1989) need to be reconstructed. Many of the castle towers are ...