One Fine Autumn Day in Tokyo
Travel diaries: a one-day walk through (some of) Tokyo’s best fall foliage spots.
Good afternoon,
We are in the last stretch of the fall-colors season in Japan, which seems to have reached its peak in Tokyo a little earlier this year due to colder-than-usual temperatures. This past weekend brought two days of clear skies and sunshine, arriving right on time for the peak, giving Tokyo the chance to shine for the scenic beauty it offers, despite its somewhat underrated position in that department. And it certainly shone beautifully, even Kyoto might feel a little jealous.
The peak of the fall colors usually arrives in Japan’s two most visited cities, Tokyo and Kyoto, at around the same time each year, creating a very hedonistic first-world dilemma: having to choose one if your travels are limited to weekends. In the past few years, I’ve always chosen Kyoto (One Fine Autumn Day in Kyoto), tempted by the allure of being a tourist once again on a quick weekend getaway to one of the most walkable cities in the world, whose compact size allows you to cover countless foliage spots on foot in a single day. But this year, due to work and a few unexpected life events, the choice wasn’t mine to make, and I ended up spending all my autumn weekends in Tokyo, including the peak-colors weekend we just had.
This gave me the opportunity to play tourist in Tokyo for one weekend and put together a walking itinerary similar to the one I always follow in Kyoto, aiming to cover as many fall-colors viewing spots as possible in a single day. Given Tokyo’s giant size, the experience was certainly different from Kyoto, where you would have to try hard not to bump into a temple with glowing fall colors at every turn, as the city as a whole acts like an open-air museum. Yet it was still a satisfying one, thanks to the many gorgeous gardens within “reasonable” (in Tokyo terms) distance of each other, which made a fairly coherent, albeit a little rushed, one-day walking itinerary possible.
So this month’s extra post for paid subscribers is a diary-style, one-day piece, One Fine Autumn Day in Tokyo, sharing a fall-colors itinerary that, provided you start early and keep a brisk walking pace between the major stops, can be done entirely on foot. That said, if you aren’t short on time (or aren’t trying to justify a post titled One Fine Autumn Day in Tokyo), splitting it over two days would undoubtedly be the more sane and enjoyable option.
We will start at 9 a.m. (when most of the gardens open their doors) in one of the city's northern wards and slowly make our way towards the town's central parts.1 There is room for one quick lunch break, but you may have to order your coffee to go.
9 a.m. - Kyu-Furukawa Gardens
Our first stop of the day is Kyu-Furukawa Gardens, located in Kita Ward of Tokyo, offering something quite different from the other spots on the day’s itinerary.
Built in 1917, the estate features a Western-style mansion and a hilltop garden designed by British architect Josiah Conder. From there, you overlook a Japanese-style stroll garden completed in 1919, the work of Ogawa Jihei VII, responsible for many gardens in Kyoto, including the East Gardens of Heian Shrine. While there are plenty of Western-style mansions and gardens in the country, and, of course, many Japanese ones, the blend of the two in a relatively compact setting is rather rare.
The mansion and the gardens, commissioned by the Furukawa family, who owned one of Japan’s largest industrial conglomerates at the time, survived both the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the bombings of World War II. After briefly being used by the Allied Forces following the war, the estate was turned into a public garden in 1956.
Kyu-Furukawa Gardens is the lesser-known one among the “superstar” Tokyo gardens and parks that we will cover in this itinerary. I’m not sure I would go out of my way to visit it on its own, but it made perfect logistical sense as a starting point, and even if it didn’t, it’s still worth finding your way there, now speaking from experience.
Even though I didn’t visit this time due to my self-imposed schedule, the mansion's interior, which now serves as a small museum, can also be visited. But during the autumn colors season, you will, just as I did, likely spend most of your time outside, wandering through the beautiful Japanese garden centered around a mid-size pond, with narrow walking paths, magnificent maple trees, and even a small waterfall, which was pleasantly unexpected.
After spending about forty minutes in the gardens, my next stop, after a 20-minute walk, was Tokyo’s arguably most beautiful garden. It’s a place you may want to visit before noon during the foliage season to avoid the not-insubstantial afternoon crowds, which can give even Kyoto’s temples a run for their money during the season.